On the causes of the Great Depression

FEE:

How bad was the Great Depression? Over the four years from 1929 to 1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines and utilities fell by more than half. People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28 percent. Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height. The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933. One of every four workers was out of a job at the Depression’s nadir, and ugly rumors of revolt simmered for the first time since the Civil War.

[...]There was already a long history of margin lending on stock exchanges, and margin requirements — the share of the purchase price paid in cash — were no lower in the late twenties than in the early twenties or in previous decades. In fact, in the fall of 1928 margin requirements began to rise, and borrowers were required to pay a larger share of the purchase price of the stocks.

The margin lending argument doesn’t hold much water. Mischief with the money and credit supply, however, is another story.

[...]One prominent interpretation of the Federal Reserve System’s actions prior to 1929 can be found in “America’s Great Depression” by economist Murray Rothbard. Using a broad measure that includes currency, demand and time deposits, and other ingredients, he estimated that the Fed bloated the money supply by more than 60 percent from mid-1921 to mid-1929.[3] Rothbard argued that this expansion of money and credit drove interest rates down, pushed the stock market to dizzy heights, and gave birth to the “Roaring Twenties.”

[...][O]ther scholars raise doubts that Fed action was as inflationary as Rothbard believed, pointing to relatively flat commodity and consumer prices in the 1920s as evidence that monetary policy was not so wildly irresponsible.

Substantial cuts in high marginal income tax rates in the Coolidge years certainly helped the economy and may have ameliorated the price effect of Fed policy. Tax reductions spurred investment and real economic growth, which in turn yielded a burst of technological advancement and entrepreneurial discoveries of cheaper ways to produce goods. This explosion in productivity undoubtedly helped to keep prices lower than they would have otherwise been.

Regarding Fed policy, free-market economists who differ on the extent of the Fed’s monetary expansion of the early and mid-1920s are of one view about what happened next: The central bank presided over a dramatic contraction of the money supply that began late in the decade. The federal government’s responses to the resulting recession took a bad situation and made it far, far worse.

[...]By 1928, the Federal Reserve was raising interest rates and choking off the money supply. For example, its discount rate (the rate the Fed charges member banks for loans) was increased four times, from 3.5 percent to 6 percent, between January 1928 and August 1929. The central bank took further deflationary action by aggressively selling government securities for months after the stock market crashed. For the next three years, the money supply shrank by 30 percent. As prices then tumbled throughout the economy, the Fed’s higher interest rate policy boosted real (inflation-adjusted) rates dramatically.

[...]The real crunch began on Wednesday, October 23, with what one observer called “a Niagara of liquidation.” Six million shares changed hands. The industrial average fell 21 points. [...]But the next day, Black Thursday, stocks were dumped in even heavier selling … the ticker fell behind more than 5 hours, and finally stopped grinding out quotations at 7:08 p.m

[...]Unemployment in 1930 averaged a mildly recessionary 8.9 percent, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. It shot up rapidly until peaking out at more than 25 percent in 1933.

[...]A crucial part of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was that many tariffs were for a specific amount of money rather than a percentage of the price. As prices fell by half or more during the Great Depression, the effective rate of these specific tariffs doubled, increasing the protection afforded under the act.

[...]Smoot-Hawley was as broad as it was deep, affecting a multitude of products. Before its passage, clocks had faced a tariff of 45 percent; the act raised that to 55 percent, plus as much as another $4.50 per clock.

[...]Most of the 60,000 people employed in U.S. plants making cheap clothing out of imported wool rags went home jobless after the tariff on wool rags rose by 140 percent.

[...]American agriculture was particularly hard hit. With a stroke of the presidential pen, farmers in this country lost nearly a third of their markets. Farm prices plummeted and tens of thousands of farmers went bankrupt. A bushel of wheat that sold for $1 in 1929 was selling for a mere 30 cents by 1932.

With the collapse of agriculture, rural banks failed in record numbers, dragging down hundreds of thousands of their customers. Nine thousand banks closed their doors in the United States between 1930 and 1933. The stock market, which had regained much of the ground it had lost since the previous October, tumbled 20 points on the day Hoover signed Smoot-Hawley into law, and fell almost without respite for the next two years. (The market’s high, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was set on Sept. 3, 1929, at 381. It hit its 1929 low of 198 on Nov. 13, then rebounded to 294 by April 1930. It declined again as the tariff bill made its way toward Hoover’s desk in June and did not bottom out until it reached a mere 41 two years later. It would be a quarter-century before the Dow would climb to 381 again.)

[...]In 1929, the rest of the world owed American citizens $30 billion. Germany’s Weimar Republic was struggling to pay the enormous reparations bill imposed by the disastrous Treaty of Versailles. When tariffs made it nearly impossible for foreign businessmen to sell their goods in American markets, the burden of their debts became massively heavier and emboldened demagogues like Adolf Hitler.

[...]Consumer prices plunged almost 25 percent between 1929 and 1933 while nominal wages on average decreased only 15 percent — translating into a substantial increase in wages in real terms.

[...]In the space of one year alone, from 1930 to 1931, the federal government’s share of GNP soared from 16.4 percent to 21.5 percent.

[...]In September 1931, with the money supply tumbling and the economy reeling from the impact of Smoot-Hawley, the Fed imposed the biggest hike in its discount rate in history. Bank deposits fell 15 percent within four months and sizable, deflationary declines in the nation’s money supply persisted through the first half of 1932.

Compounding the error of high tariffs, huge subsidies and deflationary monetary policy, Congress then passed and Hoover signed the Revenue Act of 1932. The largest tax increase in peacetime history, it doubled the income tax. The top bracket actually more than doubled, soaring from 24 percent to 63 percent. Exemptions were lowered; the earned income credit was abolished; corporate and estate taxes were raised; new gift, gasoline and auto taxes were imposed; and postal rates were sharply hiked.

[...]Economist Jim Powell of the Cato Institute authored a splendid book on the Great Depression in 2003, titled “FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression”. He points out that “Almost all the failed banks were in states with unit banking laws” — laws that prohibited banks from opening branches and thereby diversifying their portfolios and reducing their risks. Powell writes: “Although the United States, with its unit banking laws, had thousands of bank failures, Canada, which permitted branch banking, didn’t have a single failure

[...]One morning, as Roosevelt ate eggs in bed, he and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau decided to change the ratio between gold and paper dollars. After weighing his options, Roosevelt settled on a 21 cent price hike because “it’s a lucky number.” In his diary, Morgenthau wrote, “If anybody ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, I think they would be frightened.” (I'm frightened now, buddy!) Roosevelt also single-handedly torpedoed the London Economic Conference in 1933, which was convened at the request of other major nations to bring down tariff rates and restore the gold standard.

[...]In the first year of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed spending $10 billion while revenues were only $3 billion. Between 1933 and 1936, government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent. Federal debt skyrocketed by 73 percent.

[...]Perhaps the most radical aspect of the New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act, passed in June 1933, which created a massive new bureaucracy called the National Recovery Administration. Under the NRA, most manufacturing industries were suddenly forced into government-mandated cartels. Codes that regulated prices and terms of sale briefly transformed much of the American economy into a fascist-style arrangement, while the NRA was financed by new taxes on the very industries it controlled. Some economists have estimated that the NRA boosted the cost of doing business by an average of 40 percent — not something a depressed economy needed for recovery.

[...]In the five months leading up to the act’s passage, signs of recovery were evident: factory employment and payrolls had increased by 23 and 35 percent, respectively. Then came the NRA, shortening hours of work, raising wages arbitrarily and imposing other new costs on enterprise. In the six months after the law took effect, industrial production dropped 25 percent.

[...]There were ultimately more than 500 NRA codes, [...]covering more than 2 million employers and 22 million employees.

[...]Black markets grew up. Only the most violent police methods could procure enforcement. In Sidney Hillman’s garment industry the code authority employed enforcement police. They roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books on the instant. Night work was forbidden.

[...]Roosevelt’s Civil Works Administration hired actors to give free shows and librarians to catalog archives. It even paid researchers to study the history of the safety pin, hired 100 Washington workers to patrol the streets with balloons to frighten starlings away from public buildings, and put men on the public payroll to chase tumbleweeds on windy days. (Sound familiar?)

[...]Hundreds of WPA workers were used to collect campaign contributions for Democratic Party candidates. In Tennessee, WPA workers were fired if they refused to donate 2 percent of their wages to the incumbent governor. By 1941, only 59 percent of the WPA budget went to paying workers anything at all; the rest was sucked up in administration and overhead. [...]The last of the WPA’s projects was not eliminated until July of 1943.

[...]The American economy was soon relieved of the burden of some of the New Deal’s worst excesses when the Supreme Court outlawed the NRA in 1935 and the AAA in 1936, earning Roosevelt’s eternal wrath and derision. Recognizing much of what Roosevelt did as unconstitutional, the “nine old men” of the Court also threw out other, more minor acts and programs which hindered recovery.

Freed from the worst of the New Deal, the economy showed some signs of life. Unemployment dropped to 18 percent in 1935, 14 percent in 1936, and even lower in 1937. But by 1938, it was back up to nearly 20 percent as the economy slumped again. The stock market crashed nearly 50 percent between August 1937 and March 1938. The “economic stimulus” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal had achieved a real “first”: a depression within a depression!

[...]The stage was set for the 1937-38 collapse with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 — better known as the “Wagner Act” and organized labor’s “Magna Carta.” [...]It took labor disputes out of the courts of law and brought them under a newly created Federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, which became prosecutor, judge, and jury, all in one.

[...]Membership in the nation’s labor unions soared: By 1941, there were two and a half times as many Americans in unions as had been the case in 1935.

[...]During a period of barely two months during late 1937, the market for steel — a key economic barometer — plummeted from 83 percent of capacity to 35 percent.

[...]In surveys, a majority consistently rank FDR near the top of the list for presidential greatness, so it is likely they would disdain the notion that the New Deal was responsible for prolonging the Great Depression. But when a nationally representative poll by the American Institute of Public Opinion in the spring of 1939 asked, “Do you think the attitude of the Roosevelt administration toward business is delaying business recovery?” the American people responded “yes” by a margin of more than 2-to-1. The business community felt even more strongly so.

In his private diary, FDR’s very own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, seemed to agree. He wrote: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work."