November 27, 2007 journal, the crash of 2008 by Pat Buchanan in The Times Examiner. "In March 1929 the Harding Coolidge era came to an end. The eight years had witnessed the greatest peacetime prosperity in any nation in history: America in the roaring 20's. Early that March, Kalvin Coolidge handed the presidency over to Herbert Hoover, who had just pulled off a third straight Republican landslide. "I donot choose to run", said Cal Coolidge who could easily have won a second full term. Silent Cal went home. Hoover, whom he privately derided as "Wonder Boy", presided over the Crash of 29 and the first 3 years of the Great Depression. History holds Harding, Coolidge & Hoover responsible for the Depression, with Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and Read Smoot and Willis Hawley of Smoot Hawley fame as accessories. As Voltaiere observed, history is a pack of lies agreed upon. Two men debunked the myth that the low tax, high tariff policy of the 1920's brought on the depression. The more famous is Milton Friedman, who proved to the satisfaction of a Nobel Prize committee that the depression was a monetary pheno-menons. The Fed had opened the sluices and the money had swamped the stock market. When Wall Street crashed, there came a run on the banks by men who had bought on margin, a depositors stampede, a bank collapse, a white out of uninsured savings and a lose of a third of all of the money supply, life blood of the economy. The Fed never gave the nation the needed transfusions. Hoover and FDR, mis-diagnosing the crisis, raised taxes and wrote up new regulations which was like putting a body cast on a patient in shock from the loss of a third of his blood. The Smoot Hawley myth, repeated by John McCain in the Detroit debate, was demolished by Alford Eckes of Ohio University, he was Reagan's man at the FTC and America's foremost authority on the history of trade and tariffs, in his 1995 "Opening America's Markets". The point of this brief history: the recent hand off from Alan Greenspan, the maestro of the global economy, to federal Fed chairman Ben Bernanke may turnout to have been a lateral far behind the line of scrimmage, leaving Bernanke holding the bag for a recession for which he is no more responsible than was the hapless Hoover. Last week, the stock market saw 4% of its value wiped out. Oil reached nearly $100 a barrel. The dollar fell to record lows against the Canadian dollar and the Euro. The price of gold $850 per ounce, signaling inflation and a worldwide lack of confidence in the Fed's ability or determination to defend the world's reserve currency. The Chinese with 1.4 trillion dollars in reserves, perhaps 80 percent of it in dollar assets, indicated they may dump dollars and move into euros. Merrill Lynch took a $8 billion hit. Citibank is signaling massive losses from its sub prime mortgage debt. General Motors reported operating loss $1.6 billion for the quarter and a whopping 39 billion charge that is the highest profit hits ever reported. Where does this leave Bernanke? Although horns of a dilemma. Exposure of all that subprime debt going rotting on the books of the biggest banks, staggering losses being reported, the inability of homeowners to refinance or borrow any further against their equity, the credit crunch--all argue for an easy money policy to get capital back into the economic bloodstream. Thus the Fed has cut interest rates from 5.25% to 4.5%, thus the howls for deeper cuts, thus the market anticipation of another cut, though the Fed said no more. But the Fed is responsible not only to the national economy. It is responsible for the defending the dollar, which represents the real savings and wealth of the nation. And that dollar has lost more value in 7 years than in any similar period of modern history. A Euro, worth 83 cents the year Buxsh was elected, has risen in value to $1.47. As the dollar sinks, exporters may cheer rising sales, but at home we will soon find that the prices of all those imported goods from Europe and Asia down at the mall are starting to rise. U.S. soldiers, the diplomats, tourist and businessmen overseas are already feeling did pain of a falling dollar. If a recession is generally a sign the Fed should loosen up, a run on the dollar is a sign the Fed should tighten by raising interest rates to make dollars and dollar denominated assets more attractive. But the Fed's raising of interest rate should push up the rates on mortgages, credit cards and auto loans, and push millions of marginal folks into bankruptcy and the country into recession, a disaster for the Republicans. But, given their free trade fanaticism and free-spending ways, that fate may not be undeserved. Say a prayer for Bernanke. He may have to eat the football that scrambling quarterback Greenspan tossed to him far behind the line of scrimmage". Don't waste your time.