United States presidential election, 2008: Herbert Hoover’s Ghost Haunts Markets

In a her Bloomberg column, Amity Shlaes finds that Bear Stearns evokes the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it.

“Within 24 hours, Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat, was weighing in with his own 1930s comparison. Roosevelt had pulled a country out of Depression and united it; President George W. Bush was doing the opposite, he said.

You get the picture: Bush is like Hoover, the do-nothing. Democrats are like Roosevelt, the activist. It’s worthwhile to go back to that Depression period to see what people actually did or didn’t do and who resembles whom. The reality differs from the cartoon.”

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