This paper examines an important gap in the monetary explanation of the Great Depression: the lack of a well-articulated and documented transmission mechanism of monetary shocks to the real economy. It begins by reviewing the challenge to Friedman and Schwartz's monetary explanation provided by...

This paper examines the role of aggregate demand stimulus in ending the Great Depression. A simple calculation indicates that nearly all of the observed recovery of the U.S. economy prior to 1942 was due to monetary expansion. Huge gold inflows in the mid- and late-1930s swelled the U.S. money...

This paper argues that the collapse of stock prices in October 1929 generated temporary uncertainty about future income which caused consumers to forego purchases of durable and semidurable goods in late 1929 and much of 1930. Evidence that the stock market crash generated uncertainty is...