Most economists, as far as they care about this issue, believe that the Great Depression of the 1930s was a pointless and unnecessary tragedy.

If then-American President Herbert Hoover had simply not tried to balance the budget in the face of the impending economic downturn, if the Federal Reserve had simply not defended the gold standard at the expense of the domestic economy, if the authorities had just rushed to provide liquidity to the threatened banks and thus calmed the banking panic that developed in 1930-31, then the stock market crash of 1929 would have led to a brief recession that would have been quickly forgotten.

(. . .) [Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]