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AS THE CURRENT POLITICAL BRAWL appears headed for resolution certainly the most interesting, and possibly most important, political campaign this season has been waged well under the radar of the [...]

ARE YOU READY FOR THE Great Recession of 2011-2012? You should be, for it is getting under way even as you read this. Just as the 2009 'greatest economic crisis [...]

MISS THE LATE HENRY SIMMONS, the legendary Newsweek reporter who covered the early NASA space flights and the Washington economics beat back in the days when that magazine produced important information and not pop-twitter. Henry kept the betting book at the Members Bar of the National Press Club in Washington. It was a battered pocket diary, held together by rubber bands, that served for 20 years as a log of the press corps' after-hours wagers on the outcome of the stories they covered: of what bills would pass, who was about to be nominated (or indicted), who was sleeping with whom. Whatever the bet, Henry was a master at calculating the odds. I would love Henry's odds on this bet: Barack Obama is a one-term president. There is a push-bet that goes along with this as a hedge. Mr. Obama's winning a second term will depend on a U.S. involvement in a war--say, an expanded one in Afghanistan, or perhaps a new conflict in Iran. Long-shot bets? Sure. Even in this discontented summer of slipping poll numbers, the public image of our president is that he cannot put a foot wrong. We are uplifted by the world's embrace of this attractive young man and his photo-perfect family. Wherever he goes in the world, from a town hall appearance in the Rust Belt to a high-profile summit with foreign leaders, his message strikes just the right tone. What would have intrigued Henry about the bet, as it does me, is one of the iron rules of American politics: your Americano loves to get himself into a jam of some sort and then to create hero-presidents, often out of thin air. He gathers enormous powers into his hands with the promise that all problems will be solved. But after that first euphoria comes inevitable disenchantment. And then, with a surprising vengeance, repudiation. We love to idolize our invented heroes, but almost as quickly we find fault and turn against the vast powers they have accumulated. Like the "Gadarene swine," as Henry loved to call the American voting mass, we rush madly to wreck the restraints imposed on us and revenge ourselves on imagined enemies. Then after a period of dull sobriety a new crisis arises and we start the round again with a new hero. It's as American as apple pie. TAKE MR. OBAMA'S ROLE MODEL, Abraham Lincoln. The 49 months of the Lincoln presidency are a textbook case of how in a crisis a chief executive can seize an astonishing amount of extra-constitutional power with popular acquiescence, how he can use that power ruthlessly and without check, and how just as remorselessly that power can be snatched away and his accomplishments reversed when the crisis is popularly believed to have past. This is true even when the crisis continues in only a slightly less ominous fashion. James M. McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian, writes in his latest book, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, that Lincoln invented the very phrase--"war powers"--that established the president as the first among equals within the U.S. government. When Lincoln took office those powers were vague bordering on nonexistent. The original draft of the Constitution's Article II, Section 2 said merely, "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States." Subsequent refinements provided by the Supreme Court during protests over the Mexican War added only that his command was to employ those forces "in the manner he may deem most effectual to harass and conquer and subdue the enemy." While Congress dithered and the Supreme Court fumed, Lincoln unilaterally ordered a naval blockade of Southern ports (even of states that had not yet seceded) and the seizure of shipping. Then, in defiance of a Supreme Court finding, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus and began arresting state legislators and even a federal judge believed sympathetic to secession. Once Lincoln's famous Cabinet of Rivals was in place they outdid themselves in expanding his power. The postmaster general blocked the circulation of newspapers that opposed the conduct of the war. U.S. marshals began to arrest dissenters, draft resisters, and war protesters, with the accused tried before military commissions and courts martial. It has been documented that Secretary of State William Seward ordered military arrests of more than 800 civilians while Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had soldiers arrest more than 13,000 private citizens during the war. WHILE LINCOLN'S VIOLATIONS of civil liberties have been rehashed often, less appreciated was his transformation of the still fragmented U.S. economy onto a coordinated national war footing. The Great Emancipator became the Great Nationalizer. Without reference to congressional authority or appropriations, he not only increased the size of the army and navy but also advanced 2 million dollars from the Treasury to three private New York financiers so they could hurry orders for arms and vessels for the war. Of longer-term impact was the issuance of a whopping $440 million in "greenbacks," fiat money not tied to the legal requirement that it be redeemable in gold on demand. Of equal importance, Lincoln effectively seized the North's railroads and turned them into a strategic weapon of warfare, adding hundreds of miles of new track and bridges and millions of dollars' worth of new locomotives and rolling stock even as he rammed through Congress the charters for the construction of the first transcontinental railroad system. But then look what happened. Set aside for a moment the myth that had Lincoln lived he would have adroitly healed the facture between North and South, been more lenient with the defeated South, and ensured a smoother and more secure transformation of the former slave population into full citizenship and economic equality. His tragic murder has obscured the fact that the dramatic military victories that swept him back into office in the 1864 elections also brought in a Congress determined to exact revenge on the former Confederacy and to reward themselves and their backers among the Northern industrialists and financiers who been dragooned into the Union's cause by the diktats of Lincoln and his imperious cabinet. One can only speculate on what a dismal second term Lincoln would have had if he had lived. But what is clear is how fast the power held by his administration was dismantled once the war was over and what an orgy of reprisal and wreckage went on for more than a decade afterward. By the end of 1865 fully half the Navy had been sold off at bargain prices to Yankee shipping companies; by 1867 there were but 56 (out of more than 400) warships in commission. The military railroad network also vanished into private hands. The speculation in the greenback currencies sparked cycles of boom and panic for the next 20 years. The longer-term reaction to Lincoln's seizure of power left Washington impotent as an influence over the shaping of America's industrial evolution for the rest of that century. The public was left exhausted by the horrors of the war and in the rush for reparations turned violently revengeful not only against the errant former Confederates but against any group perceived as a threat, whether immigrants, early labor union organizers, or women seeking to expand control over their own lives. By 1900 the ostensible beneficiaries of the Civil War, the three and a half million former slaves, had seen many of their civil liberties nullified in fact and in law and many were no better off economically. In much of the nation, be it rural South or urban North, they were the target of unspeakable violence and hatred. So viral was political revulsion in the South that in many states as many poor whites were disenfranchised as blacks. NOR IS THIS AN ISOLATED CASE. Think for a moment about what happened to the attempts of two other presidents who took the Lincoln playbook and essentially institutionalized extraordinary powers--police, economic, and cultural--using the excuse of wartime crisis. Woodrow Wilson, starting in 1915, a year before his reelection campaign on a peace platform, began to seize the reins of political and economic controls needed to gear up the American war machine. Unlike Lincoln's, Wilson's war powers were more formally and institutionally organized because he was able to get a pliant Democratic-controlled Congress to ratify his orders. Creation of a War Industries Board (headed by his campaign funding angel, Bernard Baruch) was a de facto nationalization of not only the railroads but much of American heavy industry as well. The Trading with the Enemy Act and the Overman Act institutionalized Wilson's control over food prices and the nation's export and import industries, and obligated the financial sector to fund the war effort without complaint. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Espionage Act and the Committee on Information that ruthlessly crushed any protests or quibbles about the war were positively Lincolnesque. Newspapers were suppressed and protesters were jailed without warrant. While the jailing of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was mutedly criticized by some as overreaching, no voice was raised at the construction at Fort Oglethorpe near Atlanta and at Chattanooga of concentration camps where more than 4,000 German and Austrian "aliens" (including poets, scholars, musicians, and businessmen) were interned without recourse to the courts; of those not deported at the war's end as many as 300 remained in the camps until 1920. Although for different reasons, the popular revolt against Wilson's power grab proved as fatal to him as it had to Lincoln. The November 1918 elections turfed Wilson's docile congressional majority out and gave a determined band of Republican opponents and Progressive skeptics control of America's postwar agenda. The president sailed for Paris convinced he would single-handedly reshape the entire world only to have the rug pulled out from beneath his feet back home. Not only was his quest for a League of Nations repudiated, but most of the presidency's wartime powers were clawed back. The political vacuum thus created, as it had in Lincoln's aftermath, provoked a rage of revenge fanned by politicians scrambling to pick up the pieces. Anyone suspected of being somehow "alien" felt the knife edge of American- style intolerance. Anarchist bombings, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the revival of postwar union organizing efforts fanned the hysteria until it eventually burned itself out in the early 1920s. The nation then fell into a self-indulgent doze for more than a decade before the dance resumed. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ALL THAT NEEDS TO BE NOTED about the repeat performance staged by Franklin D. Roosevelt is that he extended the ostensible "war powers" of the presidency almost at once as a weapon of domestic economic policy starting in 1933. It was Wilson's Trading with the Enemy Act that provided cover for FDR taking America off the gold standard and declaring a bank holiday. Despite widespread public support in the Depression crisis, FDR found it hard to get traction, at least in his first four years in office. Despite the rush of New Deal legislation through the quiescent Congress, the truth is that by the end of 1936 the Supreme Court had pretty much checkmated his efforts. As Burt Solomon recounts in his splendid new book, FDR v. Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy, it took Roosevelt's astonishing bid to insert a favorable majority onto the high court to nudge Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes into easing its five-to-four blockade into compliance with the White House's goals. The rest of Roosevelt's historic time in office was simply the Lincoln-Wilson exercise inflated by FDR's irresistible brio and Machiavellian maneuvering. The pattern verges on plagiarism. Again, it took a real war--or the prospect of one--to really push the president's exercise of power into high gear. By the spring of 1940, nearly two years before the U.S. actually went to war, Roosevelt was in a countdown mode. He secretly authorized warrantless wiretapping inside the United States and gradually eased the U.S. Navy onto a war footing without Congress or the public being aware of what was going on. At the same time he was encouraging the establishment of a wartime secret intelligence service (the forerunner of the OSS) and an even more secret private research staff (akin to Wilson's equally secret group The Inquiry) to plan the postwar American dominance of a new United Nations organization. While Roosevelt, like the two predecessors, did not live to see the full repudiation of his legacy, it came with even more savage vengeance, leaving poor Harry Truman to carry the can during the bitter and raucous last half of the 1940s. America once again settled down to an orgy of Red-baiting, racial oppression, and anti-union violence until eight years of somnolence descended. Mr. Truman's aphorism about the presidency being a tiger that must be ridden lest one be eaten is right on point. George W. Bush learned to his present shame that while we still will respond to a president's call to arms, the national attention span is short and the appearance of incompetence will be severely rebuked, perhaps soon to be punished ex post facto. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mr. Obama faces the same imperatives in even more exaggerated times. He came to power during a frustratingly inconclusive war compounded by a truly frightening global economic panic. He claimed, and we cheerfully gave him, enormous political power and has set about with breathtaking ambition to reconfigure not only the American economy but our entire social contract. But the most charitable report card as we move to the autumn of this year is that the president's remedies have been slow to actually reach the sore spots, and some of his nostrums are proving so ill conceived that they will never leave Washington at all. IN THE MEANTIME, there is a public suspicion that the economic recession is healing itself. Spurious "green shoots" are being trumpeted in the press. Wall Street share prices show a grudging tendency to rise, home construction has fluttered out of its coma, some banks and manufacturers that had been administered last rites by Treasury priests have taken up their beds and begun to stagger about. By no means does this mean that we can resume singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." To the contrary, the global recession is likely to worsen well into next year and our own economy will continue to choke, sputter, and lurch while your average Joe the Whatever has begun to grumble. To be fair, Mr. Obama has not had any dissenters slung into prison, at least not yet. Nor is the press being suppressed, but why would he bother? Yet his seizure of vast extra-legal controls over our financial system, his arbitrary selection of winners and losers in the private economy, his firing of executives and thwarting of the time-proven mechanism of our bankruptcy laws and market forces--however justified it may have been in his mind--carries dangers for him and for us all. The question, finally, is when--not if--does the popular tiger turn on the man astride his back? We are just a few weeks away from the beginning of the 2010 congressional elections scramble and what happens from then on will affect the odds on my bet. I wish I could calculate the odds better and soon perhaps I can. But I miss Henry Simmons right now. James Srodes is a veteran Washington journalist and author. His email is srodesnews@msn.com.

IT IS COMMONPLACE TODAY to believe we should refer to the benign innovations of John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression in order to understand what is driving President Obama's team of economic strategists. But a look back to that time leads one to conclude the Depression-era economist who appears most relevant to what is going on bears the improbable name of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. From his post as head of the Reichsbank, in a career that ran nearly 20 years, Schacht was in effective control of the shambolic German economy for successive Weimar Republic governments and the pre-World War II regime of Adolf Hitler. During that time he routinely talked one game and ran another. He was a vocal supporter of returning the global marketplace to the fictional discipline of the gold standard even as he implemented inflationary policies to jump-start a society paralyzed by chaotic politics at home and foreign demands for war reparations that had to be finessed at all costs. Much of what Schacht did found its way into Keynes's landmark 1936 treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Indeed, Keynes nodded in Schacht's direction in the foreword to the German edition of his book, where he stated his economic theories "can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire." Before devotees of our prince-president start reaching for their pitchforks and tar buckets, let's be clear that the brand of national socialism now being practiced in Washington has nothing to do with the capital-lettered National Socialism that drove the horrible Hitler regime or the equally disgraceful brands of big-F Fascism practiced by Mussolini, Franco, Peron, and other despots of the last century and this. Schacht himself was a stiff-necked and bumptiously offensive self-promoter but he was never a Nazi, a fact Hitler himself recognized by putting him in a concentration camp toward the war's end. And while the revenge-minded Allies tried him for war crimes, even the Nuremberg judges acquitted him. It is not a war crime to be a central banker, although it is a thought. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Obamanomics, if that is the word, also bears little resemblance to the idealized soft-socialism we attribute to the FDR era, or what came in harder form in the wave of nationalizations and state-owned enterprises that the Labour Party tried to run in Britain, or in the capital-S Socialist governments that held sway over the European Union. Neither Larry Summers nor Timothy Geithner nor Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke want to take over the management of Wall Street's banks, let alone have to set up complex government agencies to operate General Motors or any other business sector further down the Toxic Asset Rescue Plan food chain. Instead of actually trying to take over the formal management of the private sector, the Obama plan is to use the printing presses of the Federal Reserve as a powerful lever to force private enterprise to serve the administration's social agenda. Congress, pacified with pork injections, will have no policy role. State governments, which once were seedbeds of innovation, are on a short leash held by the White House. When the president pointedly told a White House audience of big-city mayors, "We will be watching you," it was not merely a warning to handle the anticipated flow of federal funds with probity; it was an injunction that programs with the administration's imprimatur were to be given priority. So it is not the socialism of the Old Left at work. To recognize this is to understand the growing undercurrent of fretful unhappiness festering among traditional liberal Democratic pols like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or appearing on the far-left blogs of Daily Kos and the Huffington Post. But from the right or left, what's happening is still alarming if one believes in free markets and a free society. WHILE THE THREAT OF A new form of governmental diktat by printing press is troubling enough in the sense of lost civil liberties, consider this: What if it doesn't work, doesn't jumpstart things? Or, worse, what if Obamanomics is a cure for an ailment that turns out to be not as threatening as it was on Inauguration Day, and actually tail-spins us into a new cycle of artificial boom followed by, a couple of years hence, an even deeper spiral of financial paralysis, market failure, and collapse? It has become a cliche in its own right that history does not repeat itself. But certainly the history of Hjalmar Schacht gives a frightening hint of what disasters lie ahead when economic policies are formed by tiny groups of elitists removed from any official oversight and insulated from the abrasive but necessary challenges of a democratic political system. In what turned out to be two separate careers, Schacht and three other close personal friends can be fairly said to have caused the 1929 crash and then to have muddled around making things worse in the Great Depression that followed. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The three chums, it turns out, were the heads of central banks themselves, the Bank of England, the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and the Banque de France. Starting in the early 1920s this quartet set out to create a new global financial system to replace the one shattered by World War I and left in dysfunctional crisis. The four, not surprisingly, became international media celebrities. "The Most Exclusive Club in the World" was the press nickname for their frequent secret conclaves. Their closeness was magnified by the absence of much input from the elected officials they nominally served. Presidents, prime ministers, dictators, and especially national legislatures apparently had such an ignorant indifference to monetary strategy that they anxiously deferred to the dictates of the quartet of men judged to be wizards. There might be a slight historical echo in the current lack of real curiosity about what exactly the economic philosophy of President Obama might be so as long as Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, and Ben Bernanke are standing in front of him. Instead of the four friends of the Exclusive Club, we now have the Three Amigos. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Bank of England's governor, Montagu Norman, was an eccentric, fragile dilettante determined to restore the bank to its prewar dominance of global finance. Norman was a press favorite, the very model of a British central banker. He sported a Van Dyke beard, velvet-collared cape, and slouch hat and made his transatlantic voyages to Club meetings under assumed names. He also was prone to emotional collapses at moments of crisis. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Benjamin Strong was chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which nominally was just one of 12 ill-defined regional institutions established in 1913. But since the Great War it clearly had succeeded to the Bank of England's place in the sun. Strong looked like the classic Ivy League athletic type but in fact had become a bank clerk out of high school. Often sidelined with chronic tuberculosis and depression, Strong battled the fierce protectionist public mood and almost invincible ignorance within the U.S. Congress and White House to keep the United States internationally involved and globally dominant. Emile Moreau, the director of the Banque de France, was burdened by a rancorous personality in part caused by trying to restore his war-shattered nation's international role as a trade and financial power abroad while at home he faced a political chaos where governments lasted for hours instead of years. Norman and Moreau were determined to squeeze Germany for payments without killing the goose while they both diluted the wartime debts their own governments had incurred from America. There was just so much each could do for the other since at no time did their governments trust each other. Strong was determined to help all three revive as trading partners and repay their U.S. war debts, but without weakening the postwar boom in new American bank loans and export sales to all of Europe. Schacht, whose only hand during the frenzied 1920s was to use the threat of a default on Germany's reparations, played them all. Yet the four maintained a personal intimacy with one another; they holidayed together, became family friends, and by today's standards it all seems a little odd. OF COURSE THE COMMITMENT OF the four central bank chiefs to revive the world was doomed to failure because it was founded on the myth that a return to pegging their currencies to a fixed measure of monetary gold was the key to stability and a return of public confidence. Gold in those days occupied the role held today by the myth of the almighty American dollar as the international vehicle for trade and finance. The comparison is apt. There was, by estimate, about $6 billion in monetary gold ($1.2 trillion by today's purchasing power) in the central bank vaults of the four nations, more than $4 billion of which was stashed in Strong's basement at the New York Fed. To meet the needs of expanding economies, the gold standard that by necessity most nations adopted after the war imposed a system of exchange rates that raised a constant threat of devaluation and inflationary price spirals. So today, the dollar held by American foreign trade partners from China to Dubai has been systematically devalued by successive administrations through budget deficits and trade account losses. Now, as then, Mr. Bernanke is devaluing Mr. Obama's debt obligations by buying U.S. Treasury bonds with new printed currency. But also now, as then, markets tend to adjust when one nation is a chronic profligate. Back then, faced with complaints that British and French loans from Wall Street were hampering their revivals, President Calvin Coolidge laconically observed: "They hired the money, didn't they?" More recently, the estimable Paul Volcker, head of Mr. Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, could counter Chinese complaints that their dollar holdings were being evaporated only slightly less laconically: "They hold all these dollars because they chose to buy the dollars, and they didn't want to sell the dollars because they didn't want to depreciate their currency. It was a very simple calculation on their part, so they shouldn't come around blaming it all on us." So it was in 1927 when the four central bank wizards met in secret for five days at a palatial estate on Long Island. The postwar boom was asphyxiating, especially in Europe and perhaps fatally in Weimar Germany. The three European central bankers desperately needed more gold in their vaults to fluff up the amount of liquidity needed to keep economic growth expanding. Strong agreed to cut U.S. interest rates; that's what friends do. In response, investors moved their capital to the higher yields in Europe and gold accompanied it. Frenetic activity resumed and banks scrambled to lend more to cover growing debt burdens. The countdown to the 1929 crash was under way. There were credit swap agreements that no one could understand. There was Ivar Krueger, who built a Bernie Madoff scam selling Swedish match franchises. With each bank failure and industrial bankruptcy, governments demanded that the four central bankers and their compatriots provide ever more liquidity in volumes no economic tax base could ever redeem. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] TO UNDERSTAND IN DETAIL what was happening then and its impact on current events, there are two authoritative books to read in sequence on what happened next. Lords of Finance (Penguin) by former World Bank analyst and hedge fund manager Liaquat Ahamed chronicles with a slow-motion fascination how the four, as he says, "broke the world." Adam Tooze, a Cambridge economic historian, delved deeply into German civil and financial archives to document how Schacht was able to negotiate the shifting political ice floes between Weimar chaos and Hitlerian horror. In his book, The Wages of Destruction (Penguin/Allen Lane), he documents how Schacht was able to bounce back from dismissal from the Reichsbank in 1930 as the systemic global crash washed the Weimar experiment away. Yet he regained the Reichsbank chair in 1933 in a regime he had sneered at. He returned to power, in effect, by participating in an even greater fraud. Even Adolf Hitler, who boasted of his un-interest in economics, justified putting him into the bank and then making him head of the overall economy, citing Sehacht's "consummate skill in swindling other people." All Hitler wanted was money for guns and the appearance that jobs were being created. Until Hermann Goering ousted him on the eve of war in 1939, Schacht pumped things up with a will. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As Ahamed reports: Displaying the inventive genius that distinguished him as the most creative central banker of his era, immediately upon taking office, Schacht threw the whole baggage of orthodox economics overboard. He embarked on a massive program of public works financed by borrowing from the central bank and printing money. It was a remarkable experiment in what would come to be known as Keynesian economics even before Maynard Keynes had fully elaborated his ideas. Over the next few years, as the German economy experienced an enormous injection of purchasing power, it underwent a remarkable rebound. But as Tooze documents, much of that rebound was a facade. Dramatic photos notwithstanding, the network of autobahn superhighways never produced that many jobs. Germany's agriculture remained stunted and its lack of crucial industrial resources made manufacturers increasingly vulnerable to foreign suppliers who demanded more foreign exchange than Schacht could earn. In the end, Tooze argues, Hitler faced the necessity of conquering new territories throughout Europe in order to forestall an economic day of reckoning just months in the offing. One comes away from these books with two troubling questions: Just how responsible are Schacht and the three other central bank wizards for the slippery slide into World War II? And how likely are President Obama's three wizards--Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke--to be successful trying much the same remedy today? No less than Chairman Volcker, who after all knows how the Fed should do its job in a crisis, confesses alarm. He warned recently, "We're in a government-dependent financial system; I never thought I would live to see the day.... We've got to fight to get away from that." The ghost of Hjalmar Schacht must smile. James Srodes is a longtime Washington financial journalist and author.

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