“If there is one moment in the 1930s that haunts economic historians,” writes the economist J. Bradford DeLong, “it is the spring and summer of 1931—for that is when the severe depression in Europe and North America that had started in the summer of 1929 in the United States, and in the fall of 1928 in Germany, turned into the Great Depression.” The currency and banking convulsions of 1931 changed the nature of the economic collapse. As prices fell and businesses were unable to service their debts, bankruptcies proliferated, further chilling spending and economic activity. A corrosive
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