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.