You need to read Murray Newton Rothbard’s work on the Great Depression if you think the Federal Reserve had no effect on the economy of the 1920’s and 30’s.
https://www.libertyclassroom.com/depression/
Rothbard would maintain that the FED allowed the speculative bubble to build and then allowed the depression to deepen after the bank failures. The FED has continually mismanaged over the years which is another reason to be skeptical of any group of politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, bankers or even economists trying to run our lives.
This tariff issue reminds me of the early seventies when Nixon started the wage and price controls because of the ravings of the democrats and a few economically ignorant Republicans. It was a disaster. What temporary salutary effects it may have had at the beginning were soon followed by massive inflation.
Tariffs may not be as bad but it is still not good. It’s like another tax increase and will cause the price of most goods using steel and aluminum to rise.
I’ve read it and wasn’t persuaded. It’s the von Mises/Austrian School theory that the Fed offering cheap money to the banking system created an artificial boom during the 20s.
To me it’s a too simplistic version of the business cycle and it fails to explain why during the Depression only the American banking system suffered a massive deflation. American rural banks collapsed in huge numbers because restrictions on branch banking left them without money center partners to save them from being wrecked by a run- Canada by comparison had branch banking and didn’t suffer the same fate.
The Fed’s fault in it all was failing to act as lender of last resort once the panics began after the collapse of Bank of United States.
“This tariff issue reminds me of the early seventies when Nixon started the wage and price controls because of the ravings of the democrats and a few economically ignorant Republicans. It was a disaster. What temporary salutary effects it may have had at the beginning were soon followed by massive inflation.”
Nixon’s controls were a disaster. So was his abrogation of Bretton Woods breaking the dollar’s last link to gold.
The seeds of the 1970’s inflation began years earlier, back to Eisenhower in the 1950s, caused by something called The Triffin Dilemma:
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1011/how-the-triffin-dilemma-affects-currencies.aspx