In the wake of the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve took unprecedented measures to stem economic decline. This column uses the Fed’s open-market operations in 1932,another period of short-term rates near the zero lower bound, as a comparison for the QE1 operation of 2008-09. Although the 1932 policy boosted output and inflation,if the Fed had announced the operation in advance and carried it out for a full year,the Great Depression could have been attenuated considerably earlier[…]