THE FORGOTTEN ECONOMIC CRISIS OF ’68:

There have been many accounts of the 1960s, and of the tumultuous year 1968 in particular, but strangely missing from most of them, writes Collins, a historian at the University of Missouri at Columbia, is “the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression.” The crisis of 1968 “marked the beginning of the end of America’s postwar economic boom,” he argues, and helped persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson to cap escalation of the Vietnam War and curtail the Great Society.

The crisis-which culminated in March in a speculative run on gold (“the largest gold rush in history,” Time called it in a cover story) was brought on by a combination of factors, Collins says. The “most deeply rooted one was chronic U.S. balance-of-payments deficits. The causes: increased spending overseas, both by American tourists and a U.S. government vigorously prosecuting the Cold War, as well as increased imports from an economically resurgent Europe. The deficits produced a glut of dollars abroad, weakening other nations’ confidence in the dollar; (The dollar was then tied to the gold standard, while other nations’ currencies were tied to the dollar.)

The Johnson administration’s massive expenditures on the Vietnam War seriously aggravated the balance-of-payments problem and also fueled inflation.

In March of ’21, Robert Reich’s column at Newsweek was headlined, “This Is Biden’s LBJ Moment.” It sure is, Robert. It sure is.