The New Deal and Recovery, Part 11: The Roosevelt Recession, Continued SHARE Massive jolts of New Deal spending had stopped the economic slide, [but the economy crashed again when] over two years, FDR slashed government spending 17 percent. (From a 2011 NPR presentation.)
In the last installment of this series, I discussed the hypothesis that the 1937 collapse resulted from an ill-conceived tightening of monetary policy to which both the Fed and the Treasury contributed.
While authorities differ in the degree of responsibility they assign to each, there s widespread agreement that, between them, instead of merely extinguishing a boom, as they intended to do, both Fed and Treasury officials helped bring about a crash that undid much of the post-1933 recovery.