Read more: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression
And none other then Benny Bernanke insists that Smoot-Hawley was a minor problem, and that the real problem was Federal Reserve mismanagement of the money supply in the aftermath of the stock market price collapse.
As he said to the Reserve bankers, We caused it.
Thus his label of Helicopter Ben because he planned to do quite the opposite should he be confronted with such an event.
Which of course he did, and the result is $20 trillion of debt. But that’s another discussion....