Episode Details

In this episode, we explore how fdr s new deal rebuilt america. I mean, imagine looking out your window during basically the absolute worst starvation crisis in American history and you're watching the federal government pay farmers to just slaughter six million pigs and let the meat literally rot in the sun. Yeah, it sounds completely absurd. Right. Or watching them actively plow under 10 million acres of perfectly good growing cotton while people are walking around in actual rags. I mean, it sounds like absolute madness, like a cartoon villain's plot or something. It really does. But in 1933, it was a desperate calculated mathematical equation, right, designed to basically save the United States from total collapse. So welcome to our deep dive. Today we are looking at a massive encyclopedic breakdown of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Yes, specifically spanning from 1933 to 1938. Exactly. And our mission for this deep dive is to really cut through the heavy historical completely frozen economy. Which perfectly explains the next major triage move, taking the US off the gold standard. Because as long as the US dollar was rigidly tied to a specific amount of physical gold, The central bank was wearing a straight jacket. They couldn't just print more money or aggressively lower interest rates to fight that deflation. Because if they did, investors would panic. They'd demand their dollars be converted to gold and ship that gold overseas. It would drain the country's reserves entirely. So suspending the gold standard allowed the dollar to float freely. The Federal Reserve could finally expand the money supply. By printing money, they were intentionally trying to cause inflation to break that death spiral and allow people to actually pay off their crushing debts. And that gets us through the financial triage. Right. So the bleeding is finally stopped. The banks are stabilized. The