[Crucial]

I thought this was a well thought out explanation of the role of tarrifs and their role in the Great Depression. It looks to cover most, if not all the bases, including monetary policy and debt deflation.

[cba123]

I say “bunk” on this.

Smoot-Hawley happened way way back, when America actually MADE THINGS IN AMERICA.

Now is entirely different. Now we import everything, much of it from China, and Mexico.

That is a massive difference.

Hugh.

[central_va]

This is pure crap. Trade was only 4% of GNP in the 1930's. If all trade ceased it couldn't have had a major impact on the GNP and the GD. What a bunch of revisionist economics. Globalist propaganda at its worst.

[marktwain]

A more serious problem was Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s constant meddling in the economy.

Business and investors never knew which way to jump. Investments were not secure.

The Government even made the possession of gold coin illegal!

Most economists now do not believe that the tarrifs were a large problem.

[central_va]

But the impact of trade was miniscule when compared to the size of the overall economic contraction. Government expenditures remained essentially constant, but private consumption and investment plummeted. Of the $131 billion in lost economic output over the five-year period, only about $0.7 billion seems attributable to trade. This is shown as the last entry in the last row of the table. In either absolute or relative terms, the trade portion of the economic contraction of the Great Depression appears to be of little import.

Read more: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression

[SamAdams76]

OK, who first heard of the Smoot-Hawley Act by watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?

[1rudeboy]

Note the time of my post—it is when someone of above-average reading-speed would indicate that they read the piece.

[ml/nj]

I'm just a guy who was looking to protect my meager assets back when Carter was President and interest rates were 13% or more. (My first mortgage was 13.5%!) I understand the argument about tariffs and some part of me would like some poor Chinese guy to give me a large flat-screen TV. (And it's not part of my point here, but is it SUSTAINABLE for the Chinese to keep gifting us our consumer goods?)

All that reading I did back when Carter was President convinced me that the thing that caused the Depression was the collapse of the British Pound circa 1926. Then the world's "Key Currency" was the Pound as the Dollar is now. The world found out that the Brits were just printing the stuff and all those who held Pounds tried to exchange them for something else. The result was a Depression in Europe that predated ours by several years. But eventually it made it to our shores.

There have been several unsuccessful runs on the Dollar. I'm not sure why it survives, but it is probably because it is the strongest of the major paper currencies.

Look out it that changes.

ML/NJ

[CodeToad]

Bogus conclusions. Smoot-Hawley wasn’t even law until mid 1930 and the decline started long before that.

[Perchant]

The Germans did Smoot-Hawley x 1000 and became the first nation to recover from the great depression. Italy wasn’t involved in global trade at all and really never was affected by the great depression. A nation like the US who had a huge trade surplus was going to get pounded as other nations went to self-contained economies.

[IronJack]

I'm going to play uneducated, economic ignoramus -- i.e., liberal.

"What caused the Great Depression?" Please, serious answers ...

[itsahoot]

Freidman himself said on his lecture series that they let he “American Bank” fail and that was the tipping point. The real cause was monetary meddling and it is about to happen again as soon as we have to pay interest on all the phoney money they printed for Obozo.

[InterceptPoint]

This snippet from an article titled "The Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Great Depression" from the Foundation for Economic Education website looks pretty informative to me. I suppose that's because I'm a big Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman fan"

Macroeconomic Thought and Smoot-Hawley

Modern macroeconomics falls into three broad schools of thought: Keynesian, monetarist (including New Classical), and Austrian. While great differences exist among the different theories of the business cycle, all seem to agree that the tariff had little causal relevance to the severity of the Great Depression. For example, Keynesian Peter Temin never cites the tariff once in his Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? Likewise Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz delegate a mere footnote to Smoot-Hawley in their massive treatise, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. To his credit Austrian economist Murray Rothbard at least devotes one and a half pages to the tariff in America’s Great Depression.

[genghis]

1931 taxes raised from 25% to 63% I suspect that didn’t help.

[trebb]

Hit piece on Trump and uses fake historical facts.