http://mises.org/media/4390
or here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-466210540567002553#
to me this video seems at best, to be sloppy.
Right from the start there is some truish statements about the FED. I believe that the FED is currently audited, just only in certain areas. Also, in the beginning it mentions that living standards have dropped, that is ridiculous, its seems to me that despite the boom-bust cycle, due to technology, living standards are almost always increasing.
And I think even most Austrians would say that the FED did not cause the Great Depression, it simply caused the 29 crash. It was Hoover and FDR that made it THE GREAT DEPRESSION.
When was this movie made?
I do think that this style of video can be very useful. Its good for telling stories: narrator, some visual explanations, short clips of people explaining things in further detail, talking while slowly zooming in and out of old photographs. Very much in the Ken Burns tradition. Although I think the focus should be a bit more on how the economics works (such as how market forces, in a free market, would impact FRB).
Maybe its time for a new one. Sort of like Meltdown: the movie
Yeah have living standards really been going down these past ten years? Have real wages been declining?
The movie was made in 1996 and is, at this point, very dated. The Fed has become more complex, and the majority of the assets are no longer treasury securities. Nonetheless, I do think that it offers a good starting point for someone trying to understand how the Fed works.
Well, I remember that Bernanke told Friedman at one of his birthday parties or something that the Federal Reserve did cause the Great Depression like Milton had previously stated because they let the quantity of money decrease or something? I don't know if that helps. I was kind of confused about how that works. Would someone mind explaining it to me briefly?
Chicago folks would say that the Fed caused the great depression, because they would have called for the FED to pump even even more money. THe Austrian story blames the Fed on causing the stock market crash with its expansionary policy between 27-29, but that the reason why there wasn't a quick recovery like during the 20-21 depression, was because of the actions of Hoover and Roosevelt, (i.e. their attempt to keep wages and prices artificially high when the market was calling for them to fall.