Trace American economic history from the 1920s boom through the post-2008 Federal Reserve regime, examining depression, war, welfare, monetary orders, stagnation, financial crises, and changing living standards.
Presented by
Explain how credit expansion, banking contraction, wage policies, investment collapse, and federal interventions shaped the depression and recovery.
Analyze how conscription, planning, controls, procurement, taxation, debt, and monetary expansion reorganized production and enlarged federal authority.
Compare voluntary charity and mutual aid with government welfare using incentives, economic calculation, administration, and expenditure growth.
Trace the operation and breakdown of Bretton Woods, the dollar exchange standard, and the Federal Reserve’s post-2008 policy framework.
Evaluate inflation, stagnation, financial crises, and living standards using evidence on saving, investment, production, employment, income, poverty, and mobility.
American Economic History, Part III examines the transformation of the American economy and federal power from the 1920s through 2022. Beginning with Federal Reserve credit expansion, the Great Depression, and New Deal intervention, the course analyzes how monetary policy, regulation, taxation, spending, and uncertainty shaped investment, employment, and recovery. It then considers wartime planning, finance, procurement, and conscription alongside the lasting growth of the warfare and welfare states. The course follows the international monetary system from Bretton Woods through floating exchange rates, the dollar exchange standard, and its later erosion, connecting these regimes to inflation, recessions, financial crises, and changing Federal Reserve practices. Throughout, evidence on saving, production, employment, income, poverty, mobility, demographics, and asset prices provides a framework for evaluating postwar living standards and the relationship between market institutions, government intervention, and economic change.
Chair and Professor of Economics · Grove City College
Jeffrey M. Herbener is an economist and scholar of the Austrian school whose research addresses money, business cycles, capital, interest, and economic history.
View full profile