ABSTRACT
In seeking a change in venue, the author stressed in his request that having spent the last years attending lectures and reading books about economics. He felt an urgency to learn first hand about how the US economy had weathered the most devastating depression in the nation's history and how it was responding to President Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives. His field investigations in 1933-34 resulted in a scholarly tome—The Illusion of Economic Stability that Haiper and Brothers published in 1939. The author disquietudes about how the New Deal initiatives might undermine the value of the dollar. He recalls his principal mentor at Columbia University Wesley Clair Mitchell telling him that Willis had never altered his views on inflation since the time when they were graduate students at the University of Chicago shortly after the turn of the century. There was a great deal askew with the US economy in the early days of New Deal.
