In 2008, the international economy came within weeks of catastrophic collapse. Concerted action by the world’s monetary authorities staved off disaster. Although stagnation continues to plague much of the globe, especially Europe, a major depression was avoided.

The world was not so lucky in 1929. In “The Money Makers,” the historian Eric Rauchway argues that the cause of the Great Depression was a failure of monetary imagination, and that only when Franklin Roosevelt overcame this failure did recovery begin. And, as his subtitle makes clear, Rauchway ties Roosevelt’s Depression-era monetary policies to initiatives taken during and after World War II, which created the basis for the next 30 years of international economic growth.

The policies of the world’s major governments helped turn the recession that began in 1929 into a full-fledged depression. International economic leaders largely followed the dictates of the gold standard, which called for deflation and austerity. The results were disastrous, as prices and wages plummeted, dragging heavily indebted economies down with them.

Of course, this evokes a parallel to Europe’s current failure to revive its moribund economy, by continuing to adhere to the politics of austerity. The sooner countries left the gold standard in the 1930s, the more quickly their economies rebounded. Britain went off gold in September 1931, followed by most of the rest of the world. America’s path out of the Depression was slowed by the Hoover administration’s gold-standard orthodoxy. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, he almost immediately took the United States off gold and devalued the dollar. The result, as Rauchway shows, was a robust recovery.