In various posts over the years I’ve mentioned how countries finally got out of the Great Depression. Generally that involved breaking the link between their respective currencies and gold and then being able to adopt more-expansionary macroeconomic policies. That was relatively easy to do as a purely technical matter, but it took a long time for countries to get there (a handful of significant countries not until 1936). I’ve worried aloud that given how low the starting point for nominal interest rates was going to be that in the next serious downturn the refusal of central banks – and it is simply a refusal – to take policy rates deeply negative would end up as much the same sort of fetter as gold once was.
The definitive book-length of this angle on the Great Depression is Berkeley professor Barry Eichengreen’s Golden Fetters. It was published in 1992 – decades…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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