On Jan 26, 2009, at 11:59 AM, B. wrote:
> But there's a cottage industry on the right, and in the right-
> Libertarian economics world where conservatives get their economic
> ideas from, that under Hoover there was a "recession" which hovered
> around for 4 years or so 'til FDR took office in March, 1933 -- then
> FDR exacerbated the "recession" into full-blown Depression. FDR's
> attempts to solve the problem aggravated it. He should have sat on
> his hands reading the Greek classics in the Oval Office instead of
> doing "bold experimentation" or regulating anything
Man that's just a bag of crap. The month of the stock market crash, October 1929, the unemployment rate was 2.3%. A year later it was 9.0%; two years later, 16.8%; three years later, it was 24.8%.
The official ending date of the contraction was March 1933, the very month FDR took the oath, and unemployment bottomed two months later.
Doug