The Great Depression Wasn't an Accident — It Was Engineered
The True Origin of The Great Depression: What Historians Get Wrong A war debt no one could pay, a gold standard no one would abandon, and a central bank without its one indispensable man: how a decade of policy choices, not a single crash, produced the worst economic catastrophe of the modern era — and why the same fault lines are visible again today. Bottom Line Up Front: The Wall Street crash of October 1929 was a symptom, not the cause, of the Great Depression. The deeper causes were structural and accumulated over the preceding decade: an unpayable First World War reparations-and-war-debt loop; a rigidly reimposed gold standard that let France and the United States sterilize gold inflows and starve the rest of the world of liquidity; the 1928 death of New York Federal Reserve Governor Benjamin Strong, which left the Fed leaderless during the critical years; extreme income concentration that left the American consumer economy dependent on a thin and volatile ...