Andrew Ross Sorkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you point out in the book, people like Irving Fisher, also Herbert Hoover — they said the lower later prices were the ones that were wrong. No one was denying prices had fallen. I call them the Negative Nellies, the people who get upset. They’re upset for reasons that aren’t good enough. Why not say the speculators were basically right? They were the good guys. The Negative Nellies were the problem. When Fisher and Hoover criticized them and said we need more confidence, basically, Fisher and Hoover were correct, even though nowadays it’s just standard practice to dump on them. Well, look, I actually have more sympathy and empathy for Herbert Hoover than I think most do. But I think if you were looking in that moment at some of the policy choices that he made, many of which I would argue were mistaken and actually hastened and made things worse. To me, the crash of ’29 was really the first domino of a series of dominoes that led to the Great Depression. It wasn’t that the crash itself was somehow a straight line. It was a series of decisions that were made — in some cases, that weren’t made — by Herbert Hoover, by the Federal Reserve, by a whole bunch of people in Washington and elsewhere that led to, ultimately, unemployment of 25 percent in 1932 and 9,000 banks, I think, by 1933 failing. Sure, but it’s one thing to say Hoover made some policy mistakes — clearly true, big bad ones — but it doesn’t mean Hoover was wrong in saying that the low prices were caused by too much worry. It seems that the Great Depression was as bad and as international as it was, was quite unusual and surprising, that World War II was so catastrophic, was quite unusual and surprising, and that ex ante, Hoover on that particular point nonetheless was mostly correct.…

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