"The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a...

The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a...

Hayek's early writings on business-cycle theory and the Great Depression argued that cyclical downturns, including that of 1929-1931 were caused by unsustainable elongations of the capital structure caused by bank-financed investment exceeding voluntary saving. Believing that monetary expansion...