irving fisher was the best-known american economist at the first half of the 20th century and once fishergot wind that edison is working on something, they met a few times and discussed the issue. what is an interesting sidelight there is that they both were interested in vegetarian diets and were very careful with what they ate and i ended up speaking possibly as much on the diet as economics and money. but they sure gave one of his books to edison. edison said i read your book. i think you're wrong in spots and i marked all up, so they were also vitally interested in the currency problem. fischer invited edison to go to congress and present his plan. edison demerit. don't know why. and maybe by that time, which was late 1922, he was kind of finished with the issue. so does this have anything to say to us today? is a totally impractical and how did it go about doing this research? let me take the last one first. he was by that i am trained in a research method, which had rod tam access. and that was to study an issue as much as they could himself, but also turnovers the heavy work to res

deflation and death spiral that economists irving fisher wrote so well about. and it's only the trillion dollar budget deficits that are now absorbing this excess capacity without the government's intervention we are global bubble would implode into a deflation spiral and prices would collapse across the board looking five to ten years in the future it's really difficult to say which way it's going to go because we don't know it's going to be determined by government policy but we don't know who the governments are going to be in five to ten years if they don't print spend enough government money and print enough paper money that we're going to have extreme deflation on the other hand if they print too much paper money we're going to have inflation so you're going to have to monitor a government policy as time goes by and that raf we know is very precarious as it stands we go to break in a minute and when we get back i want to get to all of your solutions and kind of kick the tires on them too but before we do why couldn't there be some kind of real addressing

during the years that the federal reserve act was debated and written, 1910, 11, 12, irving fisher made a name for himself on the topic. he had a scheme of his own. he's the best known american economist of the first half of the 20th century, and once fisher got wednesday that edison was working on something they met a few times and discussed the issue. what's an interesting sideline there is they both were interested in vegetarian diets and very careful with what they ate, and they ended up speaking on much on diet as economics and money, but fisher gave one books to edison, edison wrote him, on the whole, i like it. you're wrong in spots. i marked it all up. they were interested in the currency problem. fisher invited edison to go to congress to present the plan. edison demured. don't know why. it may be that by that time, which was late 1922, he was finished with the issue. what does this mean? does it say anything to us today? is it impractical? how did he go about ding his research? let me take the last point first. edison was very, by that time, trained in a research method which

really acting in a vacuum, in my view, and the diminishing return of this is over time evident, irving fisherid work on this in the depression era and clearly showed that those returns diminished. the other problem is where are the natural buyers for debt? this transition must occur over time and it will take a number of years, but there has to be a more natural order because, let's face it, we're in a circular situation here at the ecb, there's a circular debt that isn't going to work because it's really a government to government transfer and that's just an exacerbating issue. >> if you agree that the u.s. economy is weak but the fed is perhaps pushing on a string what should to be done? >> massive stimulus. we need a jobs program that actually hires people. i wrote a blog some time ago called the bridge to somewhere. we built a bridge in 1964. paid for itself 30 times over. it's a public asset. it opened up swaths of development that's in the many trillions of dollars. we have huge infrastructure needs in this country. the bridges are literally crumbling and falling apart. we got the abund