Margaret Hoover

speaker

359 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Margaret Hoover’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The David Frum Show · Was Herbert Hoover America’s Most Misunderstood President? · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

It is the largest economic calamity in the history of the world, the second largest calamity in the history of the country after the Civil War.

And if a quarter of Americans are out of work, that's like way more than a quarter because only men are working.

I mean, there's no downsizing what happened or minimizing how difficult a period that was.

What is true is that, and this is like the main point, and you and I can disagree on this perhaps, but when we had the global financial crisis in 2008, Ben Bernanke was at the Fed and is largely credited with having used monetary policy

to help stave off what could have become a Great Depression, another global Great Depression.

And it is Ben Bernanke's PhD thesis from Princeton that centered entirely on what happened in 1929, 2030, 31, 32, to begin to understand and develop alternative theories about what happened, that the collapse of the economy and the banks

had as much to do with monetary policy that was little understood as it did with fiscal policy.

And nobody understood really anything about monetary policy.

Very few people did.

Keynes wasn't publishing until the 1940s about, you know, stimuluses and how to get us out of the war.

Ultimately, I think historians and economists now believe that it was World War II that got us out of the war, not the New Deal.

And FDR's own sort of kitchen cabinet, Ray Mosley in particular, admits to the programs of the New Deal being essentially like throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.

And so there's this narrative that maybe Hoover didn't cause it, or maybe he did, but he sure didn't do anything about it.

And the truth is, nobody really knew what was happening.

What we understand about modern macroeconomics, we understand now because of exhaustive study of that period.

And to be clear, the economy bottoms out again in 1937, worse than in 1932.

And I

As you review that, I mean, you simply can't look at the details and say, well, the New Deal got us out.

If what happened in 1937 rivals 1932, what you have to say is everybody was trying their best.

People were making mistakes.

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