Originally Posted by Jeffery J. Haas
Originally Posted by Senator Hatrack
Originally Posted by NW Ponderer
I think it is important to point out that the article is the product of a libertarian political think tank. I have also cited to FEE, occasionally (usually to avoid complaints about biased sources), so there is some merit to their analyses - in addition to bias. In this case, that bias is apparent. It is a broad consensus of economists that Smoot-Hawley was bad policy and very badly timed. But it was not the cause of the depression. Bank policies didn't help, but again, were not the cause of the depression. It wasn't government intervention at all, but speculation and cyclical business realities. Greed and corruption, mostly.
What was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 if not government intervention? As the article states the effects of the tariff and government regulations on banks which created banks to have bad policies caused the Great Depression. To a certain extent banks must engage in speculation. If they didn't they wouldn't make any loans.

You're going to have to inflate a very huge tariff balloon to swallow up the sum total bank and business losses, and bunk speculation, and I am pretty sure you can't inflate the balloon that big, any more than the banks were able to front the excuse of Clinton era mortgage laws for the mortgage meltdown.

One thing's for sure, if you ask banks, there's no way they would ever take responsibility for any mistakes. You kidding me?
And don't ask the regulators either. Bank regulators on Wall Street will never admit to anything either

Warren couldn't even get a single financial regulator to admit to doing anything at all about crooked bankers, even when those bankers were caught red-handed.

Senator Elizabeth Warren asks financial regulators why they have not criminally prosecuted senior executives at Wall Street banks that have broken the law, at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on September 9, 2014.



So where's all this "regulation" all you libertarians are so spooked about? The last decade has been a continual meltdown in the regulatory sphere, with a conservative majority Congress rolling back consumer protections, often immediately after they are enacted, with crooks essentially walking free or with a slap on the wrist and a small fine, banks and other large multinational corporations being recapitalized with as much as sixteen trillion by the Fed in the wake of the financial crisis, one which the banks clearly helped cause.

Sorry, but when it comes to excusing responsibility, both for the recent meltdown and the Great Depression, Republicans refuse to take any whatsoever.
Did you see in my comment where I said how the the Tariff Act of 1930 was one of the reasons we had the Great Depression? The Tariff Act of 1930, AKA as the Smoot-Hawley Act, was written by two Republicans! As a Republican I am putting the blame for a big cause of the Great Depression on TWO REPUBLICANS! Do you even bother to read what I write?

The state can never straighten the crooked timber of humanity.
I'm a conservative because I question authority.
Conservative Revolutionary