[central_va]

Try to find Smoot Hawley mentioned any text book before 1960. You can't. Smoot Hawley went into effect 2 years after the start of the GD and only affected 4% of the total economy, mostly agricultural exports. So it is a lie and a straw man argument used by the free trader globalist crowd.

The GD was a financial crises and a banking crises. People were borrowing money to buy stocks. The whole thing collapsed. Blaming the GD on trade policy is ridiculous.

[TBP]

We had periodic depressions. We had one in 1921. Teh government did nothing. it was over in a year to a year and a half.

Policies like Smoot-Hawley (and the New Deal) made a normal depression into The Great Depression — longer and deeper than it ever would have been otherwise.

(A lesson the Bush Administration should have learned.)