1929 economic crisis unavoitable?

elder.wyrm

Banned
Of course it's avoidable. Go back far enough and anything is.

The 1929 crash in particular doesn't require a PoD too far back. Have a free-trade Democrat elected to the presidency instead of Hoover, forestalling any chance of Smoot-Hawley or similar protectionist turns. 1929 is a year remembered for a mild recession like the ones in '24 or '27, rather than the beginning of the greatest depression ever.
 
Of course it's avoidable. Go back far enough and anything is.

The 1929 crash in particular doesn't require a PoD too far back. Have a free-trade Democrat elected to the presidency instead of Hoover, forestalling any chance of Smoot-Hawley or similar protectionist turns. 1929 is a year remembered for a mild recession like the ones in '24 or '27, rather than the beginning of the greatest depression ever.
Hoover vetoed Smoot-Hawley. It was overridden by Congress pretty strongly, including a majority of Democrats. Unless you drastically change the make up of Congress and get them to ignore the immense polical pressure for protectionism, Smoot-Hawley is pretty much unavoidable.

Further, even if you avoid it, that's not going to prevent the Great Depression from being Great. The economy was locked in a debt deflationary crisis, and the Federal Reserve exacerbated this by decreasing the money supply. Futher, it was already a full-blown depression before Smoot-Hawley was enacted. Smoot-Hawley at best just exacerbated an already world changing economic crisis.
 

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I thought the Depression was partly caused by speculation in the stock market, and how a bunch of people were buying stocks on credit, so when the speculators pulled out, they were all wiped out. Thus, they no longer had disposable incomes. So yes, it is avoidable.
 
I thought the Depression was partly caused by speculation in the stock market, and how a bunch of people were buying stocks on credit, so when the speculators pulled out, they were all wiped out. Thus, they no longer had disposable incomes. So yes, it is avoidable.
That was the catalyst. The real economy itself was going into trouble in this period, and part of what masked this was the stock market bubble. Either you have a recession/depression earlier, or you have a stock market bubble and crash.
 
Another factor is that the railroads had pretty much saturated the United States in the late twenties, giving the steel and rail industries the option to suspend growth in response to a slowing economy.
 
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