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Originally posted by poet1b
The great depression was already in full free fall by the time Smoot Hawley was passed in June 0f 1930, let alone before it could be enacted and begin to fully take effect. The Great Depression bottomed out around the beginning of 1932, by which time Smoot Hawley would have just began to have its effect.
The Great Depression was a result of government not taking action, instead of government getting too much involved.
econ161.berkeley.edu...
The Federal Reserve thought it knew what it was doing: it was letting the private sector handle the Depression in its own fashion. It saw the private sector's task as the "liquidation" of the American economy. And it feared that expansionary monetary policy would impede the necessary private-sector process of readjustment.
What the crash mainly precipitated was a raft of wrongheaded policies that did major damage to the economy -- beginning with the disastrous retreat into protectionism marked by the passage of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which passed the House in May 1929 and the Senate in March 1930, and was signed into law by Hoover in June 1930. As prices fell, Smoot-Hawley doubled the effective tariff duties on a wide range of manufactures and agricultural products. It triggered the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of countervailing tariffs that caused the international economy to collapse.
...
Hoover's disastrous agricultural policies involved the know-it-all Hoover acting as his own agriculture secretary and in fact writing the original Agricultural Marketing Act that evolved into Smoot-Hawley. While exports accounted for 7% of U.S. GDP in 1929, trade accounted for about one-third of U.S. farm income. The loss of export markets caused by Smoot-Hawley devastated the agricultural sector.
Originally posted by poet1b
GW and the repub congress had already destroyed the U.S. economy long before they decided to bailout the investment banking crooks.