all years | 1929 | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1936 | 1937 | 1938 | 1939

 1931  Down and Down

gdp
 
billion
$77.4
change
-6.4%
deflator
-9.7%
m2
 
billion
$42.69
change
-6.65%
dow
jones
open
164.58
close
77.9
change
-52.67%↓
bank
failures
number
2293
fed
spend
billion
$3.6
fed
def
% gdp
0.78%
top
tax
rate
25%
As banks continued to fail the decrease in the money supply became so extreme that cities began to issue scrip and people began to barter. President Hoover continued to act. After the Austrian Creditanstalt Bank failed in May he proposed a moratorium on interest payments on international debt to Germany. But he vetoed the Muscle Shoals Bill for a government project to dam the Tennessee River and generate electricity.

1929-1939: “A Decade that will live — in stupidity.”

Why Stuck on Stupid?

Seventy years ago the leaders of both US political parties turned away from the policies that had created an economic powerhouse we call the Roaring Twenties. For ten long years Americans suffered through wrenching economic dislocations: deflation, inflation, a four-year economic contraction, endless unemployment, mindless political experiments, and ruthless attacks on businessmen for political gain as their leaders stayed Stuck on Stupid.

Today, after a twenty-five year economic boom, Americans are once more faced with a political elite that wants to monkey with success. It wants to raise tax rates. It wants to restrict trade. It wants to increase government power.

It’s time to look back and remind ourselves how it came to be, starting in 1929, that America got itself Stuck on Stupid. Otherwise it could happen again.

 — Christopher Chantrill

 

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presented by Christopher Chantrill
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