James Grant in the WSJ discusses Roger Babson, Irving Fisher, and John Moody:
So when stocks crashed in 1929, Hoover, as president, summoned the captains of industry to the White House. Profits should bear the brunt of the initial adjustment to the downturn, he said. Capital-spending plans should go forward, if not be accelerated. Wages must not be cut, as they had been in the bad old days of 1920-21. The executives shook hands on it. In the wake of this unprecedented display of federal economic activism, Wesley Mitchell, the economist, said: "While a business cycle is passing over from a phase of expansion to the phase of contraction, the president of the United States is organizing the economic forces of the country to check the threatened decline at the start, if possible. A more significant experiment in the technique of balance could not be devised than the one which is being performed before our very eyes."
The experiment in balance ended in monumental imbalance. (For chapter and verse, see Murray Rothbard's "America's Great Depression" or "Banking and the Business Cycle" by C.A. Phillips et al.) The laissez-faire depression of 1920-21 was over and done within 18 months. The federally doctored depression of 1929-33 spanned 43 months. Hoover failed for the same reason that Babson, Moody and Fisher fell short: America's economy is too complex to predict, much less to direct from on high.
