Long Depression
Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, author of "A Monetary History of the United States", on the other hand, blamed this prolonged economic crisis on the imposition of a new gold standard, part of which he referred to by its traditional name, The Crime of 1873. This forced shift into a currency whose supply was limited by nature, unable to expand with demand, caused a series of economic and monetary contractions that plagued the entire period of the Long Depression. Murray Rothbard, in his book "History of Money and Banking of the United States", argues that the long depression was only a misunderstood recession since real wages and production were actually increasing throughout the period. Like Friedman, he attributes falling prices to the resumption of a deflationary gold standard in the U.S. after the Civil War.
The Living New Deal
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, America was in the depths of the Great Depression. The stock market crash of 1929 led the implosion and the downturn continued for over three years as thousands of banks and businesses failed and millions of people lost their life savings, farms, and homes. At the nadir, one-quarter of the U.S. workforce was unemployed and national output had fallen by one-third.