[justshutupandtakeit]

Friedman's critique should be viewed from two perspectives:
1) the collapse of the economy from 29-33, the period he discusses, caused the money supply to drop in and of itself. And I have already indicated that the Fed,in my view, worsened the downturn. HOwever, it was the entirely ineffectual result of conventional monetary policy which puzzled all observers. Friedman would never proscribe money creation willy-nilly by the Fed. Nor would he claim that the Fed started the slide. The govenment was also, at that time, raising taxes and tariffs and refused to deficit spend. Interest rates were negative which, among other things, provoked Keynes into writing the General Theory to try and explain what was happening. 2) International economic collapse would not have been prevented by different Fed actions, either. Since you regularly warn against viewing the past from the view of what happened, I find your mask slipping a bit.

[GOPcapitalist]

Friedman would never proscribe money creation willy-nilly by the Fed. Nor would he claim that the Fed started the slide.

The "slide" was started as a simple case of the business cycle kicking in. The federal reserve had set the stage up to turn that "slide" into a downward spiraling disaster and continued worsening it once the slide kicked in. Thus, exactly as Freidman said, the federal reserve caused the Great Depression to be the Great Depression. You are correct that other policy such as Smoot-Hawley etc. worsened it, but they too may be added to the long list of economic interventionism that brought about such disastrous results.