What Paul Krugman Misses About 1937 Redux: Echoes - Bloomberg: "Roosevelt relished hunting down big firms through regulatory action and blaming new sectors, such as utilities, for slowdowns -- on some days. Other days, he invited business leaders into the Oval Office and talked about partnership and a 'breathing spell.'
This inconsistency itself posed a problem. The diary of an Ohio lawyer named Daniel Roth, which was recently republished, captures the pervasive anxiety of the period. 'We are having a bad steel strike in Youngstown and the mills have closed,' Roth wrote on June 22, 1937. 'The state and federal governments seem to support the labor unions and there has been a complete breakdown of law and order. Business is very quiet.'
From the U.K., John Maynard Keynes wrote to FDR that it was all right to nationalize utilities or to leave them alone -- but what, Keynes asked, was 'the object of chasing the utilities around the lot every other week?”'"
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