Episode Details

In this episode, we explore militant housewives and the banking contagion. Hello and welcome to The Deep Dive. We are really thrilled you're joining us today. Yeah, we've got a really fascinating discussion lined up. We really do, because our mission today isn't just to rehash those dusty textbook black and white images of sad stockbrokers in 1929. Right, the stuff everyone has already seen a million times. Exactly. We are going straight into the comprehensive historical sources to explore the hidden systemic dominoes that caused the entire economy shatter. Perhaps more importantly, we're going to uncover the incredible and frankly deeply overlooked grassroots survival tactics of everyday people. Because that's what this deep dive is really about for you, the listener. It's about what happens when traditional systems just vanish overnight. People don't just sit there. I mean, they get incredibly creative and sometimes entirely radical just to survive. OK, let's unpack this, because today we are going to uncover material. In 2002, the former Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke gave a speech honoring economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, who had extensively studied this failure. Exactly. And Bernanke literally apologized. He said, regarding the Great Depression, you're right. We did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again. It's a remarkably candid moment of historical accountability. Yeah, and you know to make matters worse while the Fed was paralyzed by gold the Hoover administration tried to balance the federal budget Which led to one of the most disastrous policy backfires of the era the check tax the two cent tax on paper It sounds completely harmless in 1932 the government implemented a two cent fee on the purchase of all bank checks Just to generate a little extra revenue, but they completely failed to factor in the psychology of a panicked public people were