By the start of 1948, there could no longer be any doubt: the Great Depression wasn’t coming back. Instead of collapsing at war’s end, as many feared it would, combined government and private spending (as measured by nominal Gross Domestic Product) hardly budged between 1945 and 1946, and started climbing again thereafter. Consequently, as we’ve seen, the unemployment rate ended up being as low as it had been in the latter 1920s; and the consumer price level, far from falling again as many feared it would, rose at alarming rates once controls were lifted, settling down by the end of the decade.
Nor was this postwar improvement short-lived: a decade later, Brookings economist Bert Hickman (1958, p. 117) was able to commemorate twelve years of “impressive” growth “unmarked by serious economic contraction.”
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