Roll on Green Quantitative Easing - and quickly

As we hurtle once more into the financial abyss, and most financial calamities take place in October, spare a few moments for those people exactly 80 years ago charged with rolling out the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

It is all about Harry Hopkins, head of Roosevelt’s new programme to help the unemployed. 

By October 1933, he was worrying about the winter, met president and persuaded him to run a temporary winter jobs programme, capable of employing four million people for four months.

Hopkins appealed to Roosevelt because he was able to cut through bureaucracy to get things done.  But what he achieved was extraordinary by modern standards.  The Civil Works Administration began work on 9 November.  Within a week he had summoned governors to Washington and asked them to put forward proposals.  The first 120 projects were approved five days later.

By Christmas, the CWA was employing 2.6 million people.  By February, the jobless total had dropped by four million, streets had been repaired, playgrounds built, murals painted and so on.  An amazing achievement.

Now, as we face financial meltdown, it is extraordinary how slow everything seems.  The USA is bogged down in acrimony, Europe bogged down in indecision.  In the UK, a quick glance at the Local Growth white paper is enough to see that those proposals that might have an effect on the economy will certainly not do so soon.

The rhetoric is about big infrastructure, training and cutting red tape – all worthy, no doubt, but hardly what you might call responsible action.

Alone among the senior UK politicians, only Vince Cable seems to have a sense of crisis, but he speaks in code – continue the austerity programme, he says, but also take urgent action to keep our dysfunctional economies afloat.

What does he mean?  Can you do both?

A new proposal in the USA by Democrat Dennis Kucinich suggests a way of squaring the circle, creating the money interest-free for urgent infrastructure projects.

So that is what I urge on Vince.  A new programme of quantitative easing, not aimed at the banks – which experience in Japan suggests is worse than useless – but money created directly to build the green economy.  And to do so immediately, Harry Hopkins style.

Perhaps that is even what he means.