You know how all the right wingers love to blame the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act for the Great Depression.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html No country did enough to halt banking crises, and the entire industrial world adopted protectionist measures in attempts to curtail imports. In 1930, for example, President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, raising tariffs on dutiable items by 52 percent. The protectionism put an extra brake on world trade just when countries should have been promoting it.
The above (in total) is a pretty good summary of all the factors, actually.
Let's start beating our drum and blaming the new Bankruptcy Act. People thought it would be pro growth when actually it is anti growth!! Look at what happened. All the rating agencies used the new bankruptcy act as an excuse to give AAA ratings to all kinds of debt instruments. Now people can't pay back these debts, but they often cannot erase them and start all over. Thus money and credit contracts. One can make a great argument for the new bankruptcy laws being a major cause of this mess.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore