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One of the problems has been a failure of integration of these theories. They aren't all right, nor all wrong. Keynes, mostly wrong. Peter Temin proved that there was some slowdown in the housing market prior to the Crash, but not much, and not enough to explain the GD. Friedman has really not taken into account the impact of gold, as has Barry Eichengreen ("Golden Fetters"), but it's more than gold. Neither Eich. nor Friedman really show the significance of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, as Jude Wanniski did (and as new studies by Doug Irwin and Mario Crucini support).

I give a brief overview of where all the literature stood as of 1994 in "Business History Review" in an article called "American Commercial Banking: A Historiography," or some such title.

What is important is that most of the research is starting to find a position to the right/center, which is that a) there was no bubble, or not enough of a bubble to cause the GD; 2) the stock market crash was caused by the HS Tariff AND by business expectations of what the HS Tariff would do, 3) COMBINED WITH the ongoing deflation (that few serious scholars deny), which had the effect of making (as Irwin shows) the real effect of HS about a 5% hit on the U.S. economy. (This is the equivalent of 5-10 "9/11s" in terms of damage to the economy, as Irwin and Crucini show).

Friedman was mostly right in that the Fed simply failed to keep up with the productivity and output, but he failed to really tie this into the declining gold stocks, whereby under the old Fed rules and the International Gold Standard, governments were OBLIGATED to print new money in proportion to rising gold stocks, and to take money out of circulation with falling gold stocks.

Keynes was right only that there was a skewed wealth curve, but didn't get that that was normal and desirable in a GROWING economy, especially one filled with inventors pouring out new inventions, as occurred from 1900-1930.

In short, all the modern scholarship points pretty strongly to a consistent story of the GD in which primarily the government is the culprit, exacerbated only by businesses' expectations of what else the government might do.

See my book, "The Entrepreneurial Adventure," (Harcourt, 2000) especially the sidebar section on the most recent economic studies, althoughwe repeat much of the essence of this in "A Patriot's History of the United States."