Have you read The Black Swan? One axe the author grinds is that folks only learn from stuff that actually happens - so a world where there was no Great Depression would be a world where there would be no fear of a stock market bubble. Even with the Great Depression, no one anticipated the possibility of massive cross-leveraging that we've seen.
(nevertheless, I hope current policymakers have learned all appropriate lessons as well!)
I haven't read that one, no. And to be sure, avoiding the Great Depression doesn't make history all better. It could, for example, delay but not prevent WWII, so that's fought with actively used nuclear weapons on both sides. (See also: The Game of Blood and Dust)
But we can have a market crash without widespread suffering: 1987 was an example of that.
Still, it seems the best policy to avoid doing stupid things, even if we might continue to do something stupider later.
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(nevertheless, I hope current policymakers have learned all appropriate lessons as well!)
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But we can have a market crash without widespread suffering: 1987 was an example of that.
Still, it seems the best policy to avoid doing stupid things, even if we might continue to do something stupider later.
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