Reliving the Crash of ‘29
This article goes in depth to reveal the nature of booms and busts and the government’s involvement in them.
Mises Daily: Monday, December 21, 2009 by Murray N. Rothbard
[First published in Inquiry, November 12, 1979]
A half-century ago, America — and then the world — was rocked by a mighty stock-market crash that soon turned into the steepest and longest-lasting depression of all time.
It was not only the sharpness and depth of the depression that stunned the world and changed the face of modern history: it was the length, the chronic economic morass persisting throughout the 1930s, that caused intellectuals and the general public to despair of the market economy and the capitalist system.
Previous depressions, no matter how sharp, generally lasted no more than a year or two. But now, for over a decade, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness led millions to seek some new economic system that would cure the depression and avoid a repetition of it. Read more…