Offthemat

There have been signs recently that Xi is falling out of favor, not with the populace, but with the committee. Does anyone think the populace will revolt if he gets removed?

To be clear, it’s The Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Assassination-Culture-Brief.pdf

Who’s taller? The GDP growth you speak of was gov’t spending.

It was in jest. Does Al claim that Fordney-McCumber was the real cause of the depression, as @scourge165 does?

Who’s Al Steelman? How many depressions did the Fordney-McCumber tariffs cause?

The tallest midget.

Make America Great Again

The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks even with market participation at a record high Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of Americans held just 1% of all stocks in the third quarter of 2023. Americans broadly have been participating in the stock market at a higher rate, with a record 58% of households owning stocks in 2023, according to the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances

Your question has a false premise. The tariffs had a negligible effect on the economy because trade had already fallen off.

Our farmers had been encouraged to utilize the low interest rates to invest in machinery and expanding their operations. European farmers had likewise recovered from the war and were producing more than they needed, so they put tariffs on our agriculture. Our farmers were going broke by 1928. When the Fed started raising interest rates in early 1929, it was to clamp down on the over valuation of the stock market, but it crushed the farmers. Home construction had gone much the same way. By 1928 there were too many houses and home construction jobs vanished. This ravaged the construction materials sector. You want to see a crash? Let the Fed come out and raise interest rates by 50 points, much less the 300 increase of early 1929. By 1932 the Fed had removed one third of the currency from the economy. They’ve failed us again. Much of the loss in the stock market is due to a much expected correction.

Hoover wanted tariffs to help farmers, Smoot, Hawley, and other congressmen couldn’t help including their own favorite sectors. Chronology wasn’t my first divergence, I lay the vast majority of the blame on the Fed.

You’re just going to ignore that farmers and construction workers in the home building sector were experiencing the depression before Hoover asked Congress to pass a new tariff? Ignore that the fed had increased the interest rates by 300 basis points in the first half of 1929, and another 100 before the market crash? Then good day, sir.

My condolences. That gives insight into your apparent irritability. That said, you’ve made comments on various threads and I’m going to reply to a few of them here. You say you studied history and finance. You’ve disparaged each of the sites I’ve used to show you that things are not as you say. You’ve said you are open to learning but denigrate every offering. I use them to illustrate what scholars have reasoned from their studies, they are not ideological. If you were taught in school that Smoot/Hawley tariffs caused the depression, it’s about time you learned better. In fact, the S/H tariffs were in response to tariffs and trade barriers that Europe had imposed on our goods. It’s as if any measures imposed by other countries are perfectly acceptable, but if the U.S. attempts to gain parity or advantage, it’s destructive. In the classroom you have to align with the instructor to obtain a passing grade But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the information you were given is correct. First day of one of the classes I enrolled in, the professor told everybody to not spend any more than they had to for the textbook because the school wouldn’t buy it back. There was a new process, but we won’t have that book until next semester What this book teaches, you will never use and you’ll have to learn the new way somewhere else, maybe on the job. But this is the book we have, so this is what you’re going to learn. If you pay the money and go to class, they’re probably going to teach you something, but you need to maintain your critical thinking skills at all times

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, enacted in June 1930, added about 20% to the United States' already high import duties on foreign agricultural products and manufactured goods. The Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922 previously raised the average import tax on foreign goods to about 40%. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/smoot-hawley-tariff-act.asp

Jerome Powell said he’s not.