What Caused the Great Depression?

It is common today to fault government intervention for the Great Depression. Had the government simply let the economic cycle take its course, then the Great Depression would have remained a Great Recession.

But note that it was the unregulated markets that produced the bubble into which investors poured their capital. Note that it was the draconian reparations placed on Germany that set the cycle in motion. And note that it was the Democratic Socialists in Germany who successfully brought inflation under control with the help of the Dawes Plan.

This suggests that it was not government intervention that brought on the Great Depression, but the absence of government oversight of markets.

Why might the wisdom that did not work in 1929 bear bad news to a world economy that is following that wisdom today?

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