The Great Depression itself had periodic upswings and downturns. 'This time is different' is also the mantra of every late-cycle investor buying at the peak.

I started my working life right into the jaws of the Great Recession and try not to forget that lesson.

> There is no inherent business cycle

Yes, there is. It's driven by individual credit cycles syncing up due to the economies of scale of financial distribution. Borrowing money fundamentally means more income today and less income (than otherwise) tomorrow. That drives cycles.

The buisness cycle is closer to the truth than calling economic growth a random walk. You get feedback loops which prevent a steady state.

If you're about to argue that there wouldn't be business cycles or depressions if we managed to overthrow capitalism, I don't think people are going to disagree with you lol

The cyclical nature of economic health has less to do with a particular form of human economy and more to do with how self regulating complex systems behave.

Most open system that tend towards homeostasis will exhibit boom-bust feedback loops (ecosystems, metabolism, gene expression, antibiotic resistance, human economies, etc.).

I'm not sure it's either possible or desirable to fight that at a fundamental level, although I do think politically it's a very good reason to provide a strong financial safety net.

I'm not sure what you mean by capitalism, but human economies are fundamentally self regulating homeostatic systems. You can engineer around that to make them more human friendly, or just, or dampen the swings, but you can't fight their fundamental nature.

No, I’m saying that without the Fed and the federal government acting to rationally steer markets the markets will go off a cliff and not come back. Just like Bernanke said here. Regulators matter. When the government stimulates the already hot market with lax taxes and high spending it’s like pouring liquid oxygen onto a flame.

But that's demonstrably false. Pre-Fed the economy went off a cliff several times, and came back. Look at the Panics of 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1907.

Now, I think I agree with your larger point, that without the Fed this would be much worse.

True, in most communist systems instead you get really slow growth, with occasional pauses in growth at all alongside frequent severe shortages of essential goods.

Gotta love the despotism too.

I’m not a communist. Probably the market the US spread through the globe from 1945-2017 was a highlight. A pretty well buffered system, but not without it’s hard lessons and squandering of the individual wealth. There are clear examples of exploitation.