1/2 The Depression from beyond Wall Street - by Stephen Mihm (大恐慌ー書評)

For scholars and popular writers alike, the Great Depression has long been a kind of economic Rorschach test. Free marketers look at the economic disaster and blame the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which inaugurated a global trade war；monetarists attack the Federal Reserve for its tight-money policies；Keynesians berate Herbert Hoover for his attempts to balance the budget as the crisis worsened.
The divergence of opinions concerning the Depression makes writing a comprehensive history about it difficult. Add to that the fact that it played out on a global stage, with very different consequences for different consequences for different countries, and it's understandable why we don't have more books on the subject.
These challenges haven't deterred Charles R. Morris, a writer of popular but rigorous works of economic history. In “A Rabble of Dead Money” - a title borrowed from Federico Garcia Lorca's description of the stock market crash - Morris aims to give the reader a full account. He also offers an overview of the policy response, though here the story is largely restricted to the United States.
While many works of popular history tend to shy away from discussing the scholarship that informs their writing, Morris does a splendid job of introducing the fierce academic debates over the Depression's causes. These excurse, scattered throughout the book, help illuminate why it is so hard to identify a single cause of the catastrophe.
One area where Morris avoids placing blame is Wall Street, and he cites scholars who believe the crash of 1929 had almost nothing to do with ensuing crisis. Morris concedes that the stock market was due for a correction, but he plays down the kind of financial shenanigans that have occupied other writers, save for a detailed account of the mountains of leverage amassed by the public utility magnate Samuel Insull.
Morris instead turns his attention to the other side of the Atlantic. “All of the tangled threads that twisted together to create the catastrophe of the Depression originated in Europe,”Morris declares, though he concedes that the policy response of the United States (along with that of Britain, Germany and France) didn't help matters. “It is hard to conceive of the Great Depression absent World War I,” he says, and he begins his book with the colossal military miscalculations that sent Europe into the abyss. Most of the remainder of the book dwells at great length on the “disordered aftermath” of this conflict overseas, which he believes set the stage for the collapse.
This is refreshing, and Morris traces in considerable detail the economic effects of the war, beginning with Europe's abandonment of the gold standard and, even worse, the attempts to return to it at all costs (France gets particular blame for its “semi-messianic drive...to force a gold-based deflation on the rest of Europe”). His argument derives in no small part from the economist Barry Eichengreen's “Golden Fetters：The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939,” and it's good to these ideas given such prominence.
Still, the average reader may not delight in being subjected to discussions of the nuts and bolts of war reparations and the endless negotiations in Europe over the gold standard. Morris does cover simultaneous developments in the United States, but these tend to showcase the underlying strength and resilience of the American economy. Though Morris acknowledges that the agricultural sector was a “laggard,” and grants that the stock market  was getting a little frothy by 1929, he insists it was “international developments that pushed the United States over the brink” and into the Great Depression.
Indeed, if there's a culprit here, it's Europe, especially Germany with France a close second. At times, Morris goes out of his way to pillory Germany. “The Germans paid the reparations by borrowing from the war's victors, and rubbed it in by defaulting on the loans,” he notes in a typical comment. In this account, Weimar Germany comes across as a nation of hypocritical deadbeats.