- 02 Jun 2018 17:18
#14920339
EVEN when desperate, Wall Street bankers are not given to grovelling. But in June 1930 Thomas Lamont, a partner at J.P. Morgan, came close. “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot Tariff,” he recalled. “That Act intensified nationalism all over the world.”
In fact, few economists think the Smoot-Hawley tariff (as it is most often known) was one of the principal causes of the Depression. Worse mistakes were made, largely out of a misplaced faith in the gold standard and balanced budgets. America's tariffs were already high, and some other countries were already increasing their own.
Did Hoover's tariff bill cause the Great Depression. Of course not. Did it excalibrate an already dire situation? Does 2+2=4?
One Degree wrote:Most give October 29, 1929 as the starting date. There wasn’t any one thing that was going to magically turn around the forces already in place.
EVEN when desperate, Wall Street bankers are not given to grovelling. But in June 1930 Thomas Lamont, a partner at J.P. Morgan, came close. “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot Tariff,” he recalled. “That Act intensified nationalism all over the world.”
In fact, few economists think the Smoot-Hawley tariff (as it is most often known) was one of the principal causes of the Depression. Worse mistakes were made, largely out of a misplaced faith in the gold standard and balanced budgets. America's tariffs were already high, and some other countries were already increasing their own.
Did Hoover's tariff bill cause the Great Depression. Of course not. Did it excalibrate an already dire situation? Does 2+2=4?
"Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine." Virginia Woolf 1897