Calvin Coolidge: the Best President You Don’t Know
February 3, 2016
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If I may make some points: One of FDR’s men is on record writing that Hoover had already implemented most of FDR’s policies. Recessions tend to bring deflation, the 25 pct deflation raised the real value of labor but if $75 would buy what $100 once would, it takes 33.3 pct inflation to restore the dollar to its pre-deflation value. FDR addressed this to some extent by his gold standard change, but by then there was 25 pct unemployment and countless business had been ruined and their jobs permanently lost. FDR’s attacks on employers only discouraged them from attempts to expand and rehire. And last, there is an interesting paper http://www.nber.org/papers/w16350 which asserts that France and the US, afraid of inflation, hoarded a large portion of the world’s gold reserves but did not use it to create new money, this caused a shortage of gold and money in the rest of the world, choking their economies and combined with Smoot-Hawley to kill US imports and by revenge by exporters our exports. http://www.britannica.com/topic/Smoot-Hawley-Tariff-Act
Wikipedia has a great article on US recessions that includes dates, interval, etc, and characteristics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States. You need to see the employment ratio to see the real impact of post war unemployment. Note the Reagan Recovery vs the 2007 Recession and non-recovery. https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO