Pres. Trump going big, we can do it two ways. We can keep going back every day, every week. We are going big. That is where mitch mcconnell, that is the way he wants to go, the way i want to go. I think we want to get it done and have a big infusion as opposed to going through little meetings every couple of days. We dont want to do it that way. We want to go big, go solid. The country is very strong. Weve never been so strong. That is what we are going to be doing. We dont want, with this invisible enemy, we dont want airlines going out of business, we dont want people losing their jobs or not having money to live when they were doing very well just four weeks ago. So we are going big, and that is the way it will be and that is the way everybody seems to like it on the hill. Susan historian and author amity shlaes, that is President Trump in one of his recent announcements about the goals on a big series of Economic Relief packages to stem the Economic Impact of the coronavirus. Other World Leaders are doing the same. As we start out here, since you are looking at this through the lens of history, are there good historical parallels for the covid19 crisis . Amity the crisis is beginning but it like 192930, also looks like 191819, 1920. Im honored to be here. I should say, to discuss all these parallels. I want to mention the one 1918, 1919, 1920. We never think of that. You remember the crash and the great gatsby. That was the crash of the early 1920s, not the crash of 1929. People thought america would never come back from the big upheavel of world war i. That is what was going on. At that time, there was inflation, we were getting over a flu, the spanish influenza. All of this was going on. At that time, the government took a policy. The policy was, lets pull out of the way. The government response was so counterintuitive, it is almost impossible to utter it now. The government said we will shrink our government, we will go big in cutting our government which is the opposite of President Trump and we will raise our Interest Rate to be sure money comes here. Raise Interest Rates going into a recession . Very counterintuitive. There was a sharp snap because then there was a very strong recovery, a roar even, the roar of the 1920s. You want to think of different models of how to respond to a crisis like this one. They are not all going big with government interventionism. Susan the economy and the Global Economy being so much different than it was 100 years ago, do the parallels still hold . Amity yes, the parallels still hold. Unit youd the u. S. Dollar, and we are held harmless and crises, what happens when the world is in crisis . Money runs to us. Doesnt it . When the u. S. Misbehaves, people buy our bonds. Money runs to us. In those days, the stakes were higher because we were in competition with the United Kingdom to be the world power. We had just become defacto on the basis of our performance in world war i. We were about to lose that if we were not relatively competitive with the u. K. , which have been the power before. The empire. We got into a competition at the beginning of the 1920s with the u. K. About who has the better economy. The u. K. Went to social democratic and the u. S. Went freemarket. It is as simple as that. The u. S. Prevailed. We remember the labor period of the 1920s as a rough period for the United Kingdom. That is where the phrase the dole became the pejorative for welfare. But to your point of, does it matter about being international . It always does. Our currency would have been the casualty in the early 1920s had we not kept our house in order. It always does, whether or not it is merely trade. Susan you often say that nothing is new, it is just forgotten. With that in mind, what are the most significant lessons we can learn, not just from 1918 through 1921, but from the other past National Emergencies this country has gone through . Amity while, in my book the forgotten man, i trace all the remedies that we applied with the crash and the Great Depression. Every year, there were new remedies, helping banks, helping businesses, you hear the phrase moratorium now. International moratorium on debt Herbert Hoover, helping big transportation industries, we are talking about airlines now. They spoke about railroads then. And yet in the 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 period, we never came all the way back to where we had been in 1929. What i discovered doing the research of that period, was that the government intervened too much. There was a wonderful economist in the period named benjamin anderson. He was a chief economist at chase bank, so he was not exactly marginal at the time. Benjamin anderson said, this solution when you fail at playing god is not to play god more vigorously. That is, sometimes the government cant rescue a situation, sometimes markets are better at rescuing a situation. That was the lesson of the 1930s. Every year, there was the possibility of the recovery in the 1930s and recoveries are like people. Recovery in the 1930s and recoveries are like people. Every year, for a different reason, the recovery chose to stay away. So you have a decade of recovery not choosing to come back and double digit unemployment for a good share of the period. Susan before we dig more deeply into history, it little bit of explanation to our q a viewers. This will be in the archives forever. It looks different for most of them. You are joining us by skype in the midst of the covid virus response, the crisis that the country and world is facing right now. How are you weathering it . Where are you and what are you doing to protect yourself and your family . Amity we are weathering it just fine. My family and i are in maine part of the time, we are very proud to be here. Susan and when you look around your community, which i presume is very much different than working in new york right now, how are people in the community responding . What are you seeing about society as you are observing the response to this . Amity i would like to praise Oxford County and cumberland county, maine which have some covid. For their friendliness, their post offices, their supermarkets, including food city, the underdog supermarket in bridgeton, maine. We were just there. Everyone is going out of their way to help other people in a stressful moment. Everyone is social distancing, the library is closed, but we are all waving vigorously at one another as we walk the street. Susan you have a brandnew book on the market, tell me and our viewers about it. Amity this book is about a period is different in own in which it was prosperous. It was like as a month ago. Where we thought we could afford everything. Which is the early 1960s. In that period, young people, as now, were quite idealistic and they said, why not socialism . Isnt it time for socialism in the United States . There was a big discussion. By socialism politically, we meant social democracy. That is expansion of state from 20 to more percent of the economy if we could get it. Expansion of social programs, the creation of entitlement. Everyone said, why not . We can afford it. The lesson of the 1960s was that most of the projects we undertook to get to our Great Society, again, another echo, we wanted not just a good society, a Great Society, didnt work out. And the book traces all those efforts and all the people who lead the efforts in the 1960s to make america something better. While the course of the economy is different to that of now, the idealism and the ambition is quite similar. And you know, just for a benchmark, we said we would cure poverty. The president uses the verb cure, we did not cure poverty, we flattened the curve of poverty to 10 . The president said, we can take growth for granted. What happened as a result, leading to the stock market, is super relevant. When do we expect the stock market to come back . We hope this year. We hope next week. We certainly count on three years from now. The stock market did not go up from the mid1960s until Ronald Reagans presidency. That is not reflecting inflation which makes it look even worse. The stock market flattened out for a decade and a half plus. Oh. That is a real warning to us of government ambition. Government tried too much and the stock market went to sleep. Susan and what is the relationship between the stock market and the u. S. Economy . Amity at the time, the stock market was, i would say, a good meter. One of the meters that doctors say is either the Blood Pressure or heart beat. Maybe you call it cholesterol, but it is an important meter. What it really is, the market is often the reflection of future expectations. You say, are we going to grow as fast as we did in the past . No, we are growing ok but we will not grow as fast as we did in the past. Or, is the quality of the growth we are going to have going to be the same as the quality in the past . Not quite. Then the stock market will pull back. The stock market will respond with exaggeration often to hope in the area of freedom and innovation. And there were parts of the economy in the 1960s that offered a lot of innovation, and a lot of freedom, and a lot of future jobs. One of the companies i trace in the book is the company that became intel. We didnt realize that chips mattered. And that things that the military uses such as electronics. At the time, who would buy materials from a company like fairchild . It would be the federal government in a nasa program. All of a sudden, came this insight that people might want electronics in their home appliances. They might want such a thing as a home computer. And this idea went wild in the 1960s. What i saw in tracing the 1960s was that there was a lot of hope or growth in the private sector, and we probably should have looked to it more, it certainly provided more of the jobs in the long run. Susan your book on the Great Society follows your much awarded and best selling the forgotten man. You also continue to write opinion columns for publications. From what worldview, for people for whom this is the First Experience of amity shlaes, what is your World Outlook that informs your writing . Amity i am what they call a Classical Liberal, which doesnt mean a progressive. A Classical Liberal believes in freedom. She believes in markets. And believes not in no government, not like a libertarian, Classical Liberals tend to believe some wars warrant prosecution. But in less government. I was thinking, trying to think of philosophers. I was once honored to win a prize named after a french philosopher who was popularized in america, some viewers will have the book economics in one lesson. Anyhow, he spoke of, and it is absolutely apropos for this week, this seen and unseen. He said when you do good for the seen, you create a job, you might hurt the unseen. You think about that now, every day that we stay home, we are saving a life, maybe lives. We hope. That is the seen. The unseen is the diffuse damage of keeping the economy turned off. Maybe we are hurting a life or even killing someone by getting rid of his job. Maybe his job will not come back. That tradeoff between the immediate seen advantage or the immediate seen horror and the unseen that is more diffuse is the tradeoff in the political economies that they have to make. Very difficult one to do. I have to keep everyone home so certain groups live. We all feel that with our hearts. It is a question of how many weeks we can shut down our economy without a far greater cost, including death. Susan our focus is going to be on political and economic responses in history. While you are talking about the Classical Liberal worldview, the lens on which you put things. How does it apply to watching the Public Health side of the governments reaction . Lots of intervention, lots of moving parts around it. It is a time when the government is taking a lot of action to help ensure the spread of the virus. How does that process from a political standpoint or your world look . Amity well, we are seeing we have great hopes for what the government can do. But what is interesting right now is of course we are looking to the private sector. What are we looking for . A vaccine. The antiviral. We are praying that x, y, z company we have never heard of will next week, come up with a cool antiviral, a combo of antivirals. A Classical Liberal would say, be sure the private sector has the opportunity to provide the benefit to the entire economy that it has the capacity to provide. Dont inhibit it. So if we have to look at experimental drugs, may be suddenly that begins to sound reasonable. Looking at experimental drugs. What are the risks when we try a drug . And so on. That is how a Classical Liberal would look at it. He or she wouldnt say, only the government can decide everything and make anything safe. There is no alternate safety, is there . There is just relative safety. We want to be as safe as we can be. We can never be perfectly safe. On the other extreme, you have the Health Authorities running everything and making all the decisions. There is a whole body, actually, of political economy, you normally would not bring up, called utilitarianism where they quantify things very acutely. A good unit is a util, good for someone. A bad unit is a disutile. A negative. This is a calculus everyone makes. If i benefit all, will i hurt some . How much is the loss of one person to offset by the gain for the rest . Is that fair, is it moral . It is a wonderful time for Classical Liberalism. I recommend everyone go on a reading course and read not only the french philosopher, but utilitarians, certainly john stuart mill. This question of the Public Health has been around a long time. It was around with the smallpox vaccine. Some people didnt do well with the first smallpox vaccine. You think of the stories, but probably most of the time, the smallpox vaccine was worth it. Eventually became a saintly product for all that it saved. These tradeoffs have happened in American History and World History so many times before. Susan returning to 1918, 675,000 americans died from what was then called the spanish flu. In what ways did Society Change from that experience . Amity i dont know. Society at that time, i think americans thought the flu was part of the war. Because it came just after the war. All this trouble, right . Imagine a war where one third or more of the men came back severely disabled, missing one leg, never able to work again. In pain for the rest of their lives, maybe a quarter, maybe 10 , but a significant amount had to amputate legs in that time. And then the flu on top of it. It all affected the country, it sobered the country. A lot of peoples lives were not optimal. And the question was, how to persevere . It was just a terrible tragic period. I studied this period quite a bit because in my biography of president coolidge, he was Lieutenant Governor of massachusetts in 1918. The year the big hit from the influenza. And he actually, and people who like contradictions will like this, coolidges Lieutenant Governor wrote president wilson and said he wrote other governors and said, help us. He wrote to the governors of the states around him, including his home state of vermont and said, help us. And in vermont and massachusetts, particularly in massachusetts because the people, were closer they were living in a more modern fashion, there were a lot of shutdowns. There was announcements that schools would shut down this september just as there might be now. And it was just one more calvary to endure. Fortunately, the flu went away. There was also im not a Public Health expert, but the flu appeared to go away after a while on the country kind of and the country kind of absorbed the terrible loss and moved on. Susan what were the political effects . Woodrow wilson was president when it arrived but we had a succession of republican president s. Was their correlation between the recession and the flu, and what people were choosing at the polls . Amity there was a great hygiene movement. Right . You want to imagine the first handwashing movement. Some of that is in the library of congress. Wash your hands. It was very powerful. There were no antibiotics. There were a lot of quacks coming out. You want to look for those too, now, those are ideas that might seem off. I honestly dont think it was a republican or democrat problem at the time because nobody really up the time believed the government could do much about an epidemic. The federal government. They looked at the states and towns, they looked to themselves and understood that sometimes, disease came that cannot be stopped. Because we have so much more in an our pharmacopia, in our medical arsenal, we look more to governments because they can deliver. A company can make the vaccine. The government might help to deliver it or the government might get in the way of the delivery of the vaccine. That is the different period. In that period, people expected to see death in their surroundings. Im not recommending we return to that. But that was the fact of life. You see that through president coolidges life. Unfortunately, president coolidge lost his son while he was president , calvin junior. Calvin junior was a happy boy, a lovable boy, who got a blister playing tennis on the white house court. The president watched him from his Little Office and was so happy to see his son play tennis, and then this. The blister became septic, the son died, calvin died, 16 years old within a week. There was not much anybody could do about it because we did not have antibiotics. They did terrible things to calvin junior to try to save him. Dumping antiseptics in his blood. All the Desperate Measures you would take. He went to walter reed, the whole thing. They couldnt save calvin. When i tried, many people i wrote for the Historical Association a paper about the death of calvin junior for their wonderful book, death in the white house, they asked me, how did he take it . Coolidge was very sad. He wasnt incapacitated by the death, but he was very sad. Why wasnt he incapacitated the way we might be today losing a child . And the answer is twofold. One is, all around him he knew people who had lost children. Today when you lose a child, you are alone. Theres nobody around you who has lost a child. You have to go find a club on the internet of people who lost a child. It is a tragedy you cant imagine. In that period, many people had lost a child. Vice president dawes, the Vice President who proceeded president coolidge in the white house, wilsons Vice President. He had lost a sibling when he was a child. So it wasnt so unusual, as horrible as it was. I think i gave people a sense that they could go on. Because they had seen others in their situation go on. The second reason the period was different, i will say, is religious faith. The coolidges turned to faith and god when they lost calvin. There is a wonderful story, and im only telling this so long because we are in a period where we are beginning to lose people, a story about the coolidges considering how to mourn their son, calvin junior. The president said, we will wear a black armband to connote mourning. But i want my wife to wear white like an angel because that is the spiritual place where we are thinking of our angel. I dont want to too much paraphrase coolidge. But we are thinking of our lost child and him in heaven, we hope to meet him there. Mrs. Coolidge put calvin juniors bible in his casket when he was buried in plymouth front. I hope you all visit calvin juniors grave, it is by the president s. It was a much more spiritual time, in some ways. And also spiritual rebirth for the country. Im not saying religion is the substitute for medically saving people. Im just describing how people consoled themselves and moved forward through faith in that period. Coolidge joined the congregational church, first church in washington, subsequent to i think it was around the time of the death of his son. Let me not say subsequent, around the time. He wrote later that he should have joined a church earlier. He was always a nonjoiner. His wife did the church work for them. His own decision not to join the church earlier might have been the council of the devil. Think about that kind of talk. We all have relations who talk that way in the past or have read books about it or we know people who talk that way. But it is not standard. Susan during this period, we are seeing our current treasury secretary, steve mnuchin, being very visible, and explaining to the public the need for federal intervention. During the 1920s, the treasury secretary of the time had a very important role. I want to show you a video of historian David Kennedy from october of 2006 where he talks about the treasury secretary and have you comment on the role he played in guiding the nation during this time. [video clip] does invent the idea of trickledown economics. If you can make the economy prosperous, everybody else will get richer sooner and or later. During the course of the roaring 1920s, many of them did. As i say, he is important in restoring International Financial stability as well. It is not surprising that he was in fact the most celebrated member of the republican administrations through and until 1929, and was seen as someone who had been successful. Here we have a sense that the banker is hero, he had a brilliant career in business. Now applying these talents to the restoration and recovery of the nation and the international economy, and doing with astonishing skill. Just as the belief that the best people to run any government ought to be Business People because the business of america was business. His great mistake was that he didnt quit in 1928 when coolidge shrewdly did quit. Susan amity shlaes, your reaction . Amity he didnt quit. I love the book and i was listening to it this weekend. I recommend it to everyone. Lets analyze the different points that david has made. His greatest mistake was that he didnt quit. That is kind of a sports answer. You dont want to be in a game where you are on the losing side it. So you shrewdly quit. Theres another way to answer that. He was such a grand treasury secretary and central banker, he ought to have stayed for troubled times along with the easy times. We dont want to switch into sports mode and to be amoral and say hayes failure is he didnt quit. If he failed, it is hard to see where he failed, i would say. The stock market went too high. Thats the 1929 problem. Discrete from the 1930s. The stock market went too high. It more than tripled from around the time coolidge came into office. It goes from 100 to 200 to 300, to 381. That is awful high. It is probably going to drop. Shrewdly, i will skip out of the political scene and let other people suffer the crash. Ok. Separately, the federal government was not in charge of the stock market. The stock market was regulated in the states where stockmarkets operated. In new york we had the martin act. In massachusetts, where coolidge had been governor, the state of massachusetts regulated stocks. Thats why coolidge regulated charles ponzi, the famous ponzi scheme, where you took in money to give out money, a false business. There was nobody nobody had the notion that the federal government would be in charge of a market crash. Coolidge had experienced, i believe, five market crashes in his adulthood. The federal government usually had not intervened. Theodore roosevelt liked to intervene but the others didnt. The market eventually had to come back. That was the modus operandi for him as well, as mighty as he was, it was said of him that three president s served under him when he was treasury secretary. He didnt dream that he would be in charge of the stock market. It was like jp morgans comment when morgan was asked what the market will do. Well, it will fluctuate. Mellon didnt think that was his job. It is hard to hang the Great Depression on mellon. You might be able to hang some of the crash on him, but the Great Depression, most of it was in the 1930s. The question is wide and in the is why didnt the economy recover in 1933 . Why didnt it go all the way back . Even under Herbert Hoover after mellon began to slide out of his role. Susan lets talk about Herbert Hoover briefly. He created the refinance corporation. In a column you wrote recently, you remind us that he increased he increased the income tax dramatically, put upward pressure on wages, berated markets and vilified shortsellers. What was his economic prescription for what ailed the country in the depression . Amity Herbert Hoover responded as a control freak. Sometimes party is less important than temperament. Hoover was a control freak, and erroneously successful men. He was the best paid young man in america as a young man as a mining engineer. He barreled into the crisis with both hands and said i am going to manage it very different from my predecessors. Even if there was no sec to control markets, he berated markets for selling short. He berated people for not buying stock. He did something new at the time. He insisted on keeping wages up. He told businesses that you have to keep wages up and then people have money and they will buy a car. It was new at the time. You think about what businesses are deciding as we are this week. Should i cut wages and lay fewer people off . Should i lay off a lot of people but keep wages up for a symbolic few . We would all rather cut wages. Hoover said keep wages. He did not get to the other part. Obedient businesses kept wages up. But they laid off people because they did not have enough money. If they could not cut wages, they were going to lay off. That was the rigid unemployment of the 1930s. The real reason is called the Great Depression was the rigid unemployment. We dont remember what the market did. We remember that somebody was unemployed for 10 years. That is why the great word is there before the oppression. This labor policy was very rigid and contributed to that unemployment. You can go all the way through the decade and see how Franklin Roosevelt piled on and also pushed wages up. That was the big economic discovery i made in researching the book the forgotten men. The labor price mattered. We, throughout the period, insisted on relatively high wages. There is a beautiful chart by a scholar who has made this topic is lifes work. He is an economist. He showed that labor price in the 1930s was above trend for the entire century. So in the worst period of all, we have above trend labor prices and wages. Wages should be down so we can hire more from the point of view of the business. You can look at where roosevelt continues hoover is negative work on the labor price. We can talk about if you like. Susan because we have much more history and not much time, i want to show you a video of fdr on the Economic Recovery Program for families that might give you a platform to talk about the additional efforts to be taken and how they impacted the economy. [video clip] i asked that every mortars are in the country has had full opportunity to take advantage of federal credit. I make the further request that if there is any family in the United States about to lose its home or farm, that family should telegraph it at once. Either to the Farm Credit Administration or the homeowner corporation in washington requesting that help. I do not hesitate to say that although the prices of many products of farms have gone up and although many farm families are much better off than they were last year, i am not satisfied. It is definitely a part of our policy to increase the rise and to extend it to those products. If we cannot do this one way, we will do it another. But do it, we will. Susan a lot of echoes to the base we are hearing in s we are hearing in washington right now. How did this alter now . Amity it did not get much better on the farm in the 1930s. Think about that. We saved some farms. You have the seen and the unseen. No one can bear the snapshot of a farm family losing his home because it cant pay a bill. We aided farms. Some of them moved along. The thing that helped americans visavis the farm, most was increased productivity. Today, farms do very well. Almost no americans live on farms. What is the solution to an economic crisis . You can go in and help one group such as the farmers but you might hurt another. What i thought of when i heard that farm story was real estate today. This very week, the end of march in 2020, we are helping people with their rent and their pay that they are losing. That is really good. How do we help the next level . Which is retailers who themselves have mortgages . In six weeks, they will not be able to pay their mortgage either. Those are Small Companies but what about the Big Companies . In three months, the big retailers will not be able to pay their mortgage either. It goes all the way up the chain. As difficult as it is to say, helping one group will not necessarily help the other. I think that this week, the best news we could get is not about markets anymore. It is not what i would have said last week but about the Health Innovations to curtail the damages of coronavirus. Susan as the fdr administration progressed and moved closer to war and then into war, another echo from today, fdr mobilized private companies into wartime production. What can we learn from history about that measure . Myit has often been said, mother used to whisper to me that fdr did not end the depression, the war did. In a low voice because she wanted to credit fdr because he was a lovable politician. It is true, sometimes a giant amount of spending can bring an economy back. I am not sure this is true now. The amount of spending we are doing is already almost floor level. If Congress Puts through this giant salvation package that we are hearing about this week of hundreds and hundreds of billions. I am not sure that is true. Maybe these economics have reached their limit. I am not opposed. You have to separate what we are doing for humanitarian purposes and economic purposes. There are a lot of things we can do including have the army come in and help or give companies Army Business in the name of humanitarian or social peace. What would help the economy most, i am being a little brave by saying this but it is what i have said in articles the past two weeks, it is to do something that made the u. S. Economy incredibly competitive. Lowering our Capital Gains tax to 2 permanently. You wont hear that from the white house because the white house says if they do that, they will be accused of helping the rich. What that would mean is that the rest of the world would jump into our stock market because the rest of the world is sitting back on its heels and waiting for a bargain. We are pretty close to bargain now. If we lower the cost of capital dramatically, the Capital Gains tax is 20 plus the surcharge. Everyone will jump in. Maybe in a few weeks we will be too broken for that. I hope not. The point is that our government should be looking for growth measures in the private sector. Not for military mode. Not for martial law. It may be necessary as social salvation. I hope not. Not as economic salvation. With not enough time to do justice to these historical errors, i want to spend a minute or so on what you covered in your book, the Great Society. He mentioned it was a time of economic growth. We were engaged in the vietnam war during this. What are the takeaways from lbjs style of governance that fit what we are going through as a country today . Amity the people in the Great Society were very lovable. They were deeply lovable. There was the Foreign Policy best and brightest, and the domestic best and brightest. They were smart and nice people who love the people they were helping and were awfully attractive themselves. They had good ideas and the ideas did not work out. They hurt the people they loved. They hurt themselves. I trace all of these characters such as sergeant schreiber or Daniel Patrick monahan is a big character in my book. He is like the chorus in a tragedy. He saw that even as he committed folly, that is he saw folly even as he committed folly, Daniel Patrick moynihan. Even people who have been compared to edmund burke as moynahan was, they deal with big make errors when they are dealing with Big Government projects. The other lesson is that iva private companies can teach us a lot. One of the things i learned about is a great goal in the 1960s was about native americans. That was part of the Great Society, to create jobs for them even on reservations. We did try to do that. To look at the reservations now, it is not clear how those government jobs worked out. But fairchild, the predecessor to intel created a chip factory. I never knew this until i researched this book. That chip factory employed a lot of native americans. They were very good at chip work because they were used to needlework. This chip factory was the pride of fairchild and as a local community, there is some good history of it online. Eventually that factory went away because they were too many protests there. Fairchild did what other companies did and put their factory elsewhere. The point of that is the private sector can do more than you think. When you think about government and official planning, you often get a disappointing result. One of the companies i trace in this book is toyota. One of the heroes of the book is walter reuther. The mighty United Auto Workers that dealt with ford. In 1968, the united autoworkers were concerned with getting Lyndon Johnson reelected and another democrat reelected. They did not pay much attention to this little importer, toyota that was beginning to bring in the corolla. I tell quite a bit about how this upstart, this unexpected toyota came to be big. The point is that markets matter. Attention to markets matter. Sometimes you get so involved in politics that you miss a bigger challenge in the private sector. We have to fastforward to the most recent crisis, the 20072008 start of the great recession. Lets listen to barack obama on january 27, 2009 just after taking office and announcing his administrations response. [video clip] president barack obama the statistics everyday underscore the urgent situation. The American People expect action. They want us to put together a recovery package that puts people back to work, that creates investment and ensures our longterm energy independent, and Effective Health care system, and Education System that works. They want our infrastructure rebuilt and they wanted done they want it done wisely so that we are not wasting taxpayer money. In looking at that, the dollar figures the governor put government put towards this problem in 2007 and 2008 were in the trillions. What can we conclude from the reaction that the economy had to the intervention that washington took bakhtin back then . Amity the economy did not really like it. It was surprising that president obama had that urgency. We think of 2008 has forgotten but it was not forgotten for a long time. It took many years for unemployment to come back to levels we consider rational. It took numbers and years for the stock market to come back. If you take a look at the anemic recovery, that is what comes up. Action was not the trick as much as markets and opportunity. In economic theory if you look at that time, what we call what went on both under president and obama, it was male investment. That is money flow into areas that were not particularly productive. Money did not always have the opportunity to flow where there was great opportunity. Productivity. There was investment as much for politics as much as economics. When all of us look back at that time, we wish that the government had been more free market. That was at the time that we thought the world was going to end. What is clear in retrospect is we panicked and divided too many Government Solutions to this 2008 crisis. Recentuse of its nature, are evidence of Lessons Learned at the time being applied to the Current Situation . Amity yes, they are applying their Lesson Learned which is that spending feels good. They are seeing that it worked. Maybe not so well now. There was a big commitment to spending, anyone who inspected the stock market would not go up. We can hope it will go up this week and next week, whether or not it is because of more stimuli. We may have used up our armory when it comes to stimulus. The Interest Rate cant go much below zero. Now it is the time to switch to thinking about what would make businesses want to grow, not wood not what would stimulate them to grow. You say the Interest Rate cant go below zero, but in germany there are negative Interest Rates. What with the impact of that be . In the longer term, that sets you up for inflation. You go one way all the way and then you reel back in my view. It basically says that you cant use monetary stimulus. This what they call pushing on a string. We used the monetary tool, we used the spending tool, what are we going to do next . All we can do is say we are open for business, here is how in the in the middle of a pandemic you cant do that, but after a point you can. Susan we have less than 10 minutes to put a camper on this situation. People are seeing headlines like this, the United States or the world will never be the same after this. Looking back over the history of global crises, is it appropriate to make that claim . Have each one of them changed the nature of society . Amity they have. Each downturn changes the nature of society. I think the pandemic will change the freedom of the United States very tragically. I also think that the pandemic is important because we might get the vaccine. When you think about what people said separate to the stock market about aids, aids would change everything forever. We did not imagine we would ever have medication for aids or be able to prevent it. Yet, very quickly, we found good medicine for aids. They are not perfect, we lost some people but it is a pretty small problem in our political discussions. Because of all of the good medication that was found. This pandemic, i hope will show us we have to allow Pharma Companies to invest more in vaccines. We have to give more freedom to drugmakers. The pharma guys are turning out to be the good guys in this story. I need to hear more thoughts on protecting civil liberties. You made reference to that. What were you thinking . Amity in an emergency, whether it is a flood like katrina or a health emergency, the government always takes over and sometimes too much. It is like the people in the World Trade Center who were told by Public Health authorities in that instance that the Fire Department are in the building, dont come down. The stairs are crowded, stay where you are. Those were the people who perished. We dont know whether flatten flattening the curve, the expression now, everyone in isolation at home is the wisest course. We think it is but we have to be careful about government recommendations. Maybe some in the future may not be so good. We have to be wary. When we talk about the forgotten man, we always talk about someone who was left out of a government recommendation. My book the forgotten man was about the man who did not get to in to enjoy any recovery in the 1930s. I am cautious about civil liberties. You are a president ial historian. We talked about coolidge, fdr, president and obama. We are all watching President Trump and his response to this. Can you talk from that Historical Perspective about the president s about cents how history will judge them, how that impacts their decisions as president. President trump is most like theater bows about. He believed you should jump in and fix things. He tried to do that in the 1907. If the 1907 period. That was. I am reeling back thinking about that. Maybe he made a mess of it. Historian wonderful named alvaro martin. First be blamed the railroads, then they needed we needed them to rescue us. He was also an aspiring inspiring president. Many president s loved him. He had big heart. He could be a military hero. That is what President Trump is like. He likes to be a hero. Herbert hoover also liked to be a hero. He was from business. As i said, the presidency is less about Political Party than temperament. It is what kind of man are you or woman . How do you react in a downturn . Do you take it all upon yourself . Do you say some things i cannot change . Maybe i need to cheer people up but i cant fix the spread of this problem right here . That is the way Calvin Coolidge was. I admire coolidge. He saw what it was he could change and what he could not. The 1920s were a pretty good decade. They were not just a bubble and a champagne glass. I recommend a look at him as well. Susan thank you for spending an hour with us from maine where you are staying safe with your family from covid19. We appreciate your historic perspective in this particular time of crisis. Thank you. Our available on our website, or on the podcast as cspan. Org. Miss any off you our live coverage of the governments response, watch it any time at cspan. Org coronavirus. From daily briefings by the president , to updates from governors and hardest hit states. It is all there. Use the charts and maps to track the virus spread. Our coronavirus webpage is your past and easy way to watch cspans unfiltered coverage of this pandemic. Chad berg room of fox news gives us a look at the scene on capitol hill, tweeting house, senate, sergeant at arms extend restriction at the capital through may 1. No tours, only members, staff and official business visitors. Towards were expected to reopen