1947

A Loving Trip Back to a Different America

by Bruce Chadwick

The Trip to Bountiful Stephen Sondheim Theater 146 W. 43rd Street New York, N.Y.How many of us would like to take a trip to our own historic Bountiful, the town where we grew up and raised our children, but a town that has, over the years, receded far into our memory?That’s what aging Carrie Watts wants to do in Horton Foote’s sixty-year-old story about 1947 Texas, The Trip to Bountiful, a charming, splendid play about a woman in one era in Texas history returning to another.Carrie, a delightful old woman, lives with her last child, middle-aged Ludie, and his pushy wife, Jessie Mae, in a cramped two-room apartment in Houston. She yearns to return to the town near the Gulf of Mexico where she grew up, Bountiful, a place she has not seen in more than twenty years. She just wants to go back for a visit and tour the streets that she loved as a child and young woman.

Evan A. Schnidman: When Will the U.S. Hit The 1947 Wall?

Evan A. Schnidman is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University studying how politics and finance play a role in central-bank decision making. He is also the founder and primary author of FedPlaybook.com, a central bank forecasting and analysis resource for investors.After a decade of financial struggle and a severe crisis in Europe that caused a massive ripple effect around the world, the United States found itself engaging in unprecedentedly loose monetary policy to finance public debt. You might have guessed I was describing the economy at the start of 2013, but despite financial prognostications that 2013 will be a good year for the U.S. economy, the parallels between the U.S. economy in 1947 and in 2013 are quite stark.The historyDuring and immediately after World War II, the Fed maintained extremely low interest rates in order to reduce war-financing costs for the government. As these policies became unnecessary and inflationary after the war, the Fed was compelled by the Treasury to maintain the low cost of debt. The result of this highly accommodating monetary policy was 14 percent inflation in 1947 and rising unemployment that persisted into the early 1950s....