The economic growth and production during the 20s were real. Valuations on Wall Street outpaced reality. There was a radio bubble, just like the internet bubble of 1999. The crash was not that severe initially. I've looked at the charts from 1929; it was bad, sure. We've seen similar in 2000 and in 2008, and we recovered. Nasdaq went from a bubble high of 5200 to something like 1800, and then was recovering a little when 9-11 hit and it went to something like 1500. Now THAT is a crash. Dow went down from 14 to what, 7, in 2008. Now THAT is a crash. It took years of grinding for the market to reach its lows in the 1930s, but initially, in October 1929, it was not that horrendous, and it was not impacting the economy at large.
Hoover, being a technocrat, new age man, couldn't resist trying to fix it. Instead, he made it worse, and his policies turned a stock market crash and short term recession into a full blown depression that got worse over the remainder of his administration. So, in that sense, I do believe that Hoover's policies helped killthe pro-business policies that created the boom of the 1920s.
Hoover, like his successor Roosevelt, was a Progressive. He was the Mitt Romney of his day. Government is always the solution for those guys. We need to return to Silent Cal.
We agree... thanks for filling in details.
Had Coolidge been in power in 1929, I believe we wouldn't even remember the stock market crash of 1929, except as one of about 8 such "panics" that we have had in our history.
Probably true. Reagan's response to the Crash of 1987 was to let the markets recover on their own, and they came back pretty quickly.