How To Create the Next Great Depression

Martin Hutchinson explains how:

[I]t is now generally agreed that the following ingredients came together to worsen an inevitable downturn and turn it into the Great Depression:
1. a crash in asset prices, wiping out much wealth that had been thought secure, 2. a revival in protectionism early in the downturn, destabilizing the world payments equilibrium and causing world trade to decline 3. a series of serious banking crashes – the Bank of the United States failure of December 1930, followed by the Austrian Creditanstalt crash of May 1931, leading to a collapse in the US and global money supply which was not corrected by the Fed4. a determined diversion of resources from the private sector to the public sector, initially in 1931-32 by President Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation and then by the New Deal 5. a panicky incentive-killing tax increase pushing up top marginal income tax rates sharply from 25% to 63% 6. a partial abandonment of basic principles of capitalism through the first New Deal, disrupting relations between buyers and sellers 7. a government-directed destruction of capital raising mechanisms, motivated by hatred of Wall Street and rendering risky debt and equity issues almost impossible for the next decade