Dave Davies

You describe the homes, the servants.

Give us a little picture of that.

So when the stock market really began the nosedive and stocks started to crash, in the kind of popular memory of this, that led to the Great Depression.

But it's interesting.

When I read your book, the slide into the economic depression really took a while.

By the end of 1930, the market had counter-rallied a little bit, no widespread bank failures.

But by the end of 1932, 11,000 banks had closed.

Unemployment was 23 percent, 13 million Americans out of work.

And the question was what should the government do about this?

Herbert Hoover was the president.

He had been elected in 1928, right?

What was his approach?

You're talking about essentially squeezing credit and just not making it so available, right?

One thing he did do was a billboard campaign.

You have to mention this.

So Hoover was ineffectual and of course he lost the election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 and Roosevelt pursued the New Deal and other policies including new regulations.

But what's interesting is that I think economists now are pretty sure they know what the government should have done to prevent this wholesale collapse, right?

They needed to pump money into the system, right?

One of the reasons that the seemingly most effective public policy is to pump money into the very people who were stoking and benefiting from the speculative rise and walk away rich is that we have this paradox is that in this capitalist system, the banking system –

is a public utility in effect, right?