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by burglekutt 1348 days ago
Such a clickbaitey title. There were just a few.. THOUSAND.. causes that culminated in the 1929 crash, but saying one person caused it gets those clicks.
2 comments

> "Mitchell more than any 50 men is responsible for this stock crash." — U.S. Senator Carter Glass, November 1929. [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070905000359/http://www.time.c...

If he were one of 10,000 then he could be 50x more responsible than the next, and still not be "the banker who caused the 1929 stock crash."

BTW, I stuck that phrase into Google Scholar and found https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-history-rev...

> Extremely successful both as an investment and as a commercial banker, Charles E. Mitchell was identified by contemporaries as the epitome of the unscrupulous “money changers” whose speculative dealings they felt played a major role in the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic collapse. This portrayal has been echoed and elaborated by historians and commentators down to the present day. In this article Dr. Huertas and Dr. Silverman demonstrate that Mitchell's activities, while sometimes ill-advised, were motivated by the economic “good sense” of the day and were not attributable to either rampant immorality or ungoverned greed. At the same time, they direct the attention of economic historians to the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve system in the 1920s and 1930s—in which Mitchell also played a role—and suggest that a more potent source of the Great Depression lies therein.

Yes, we've changed the title now (as the site guidelines ask in such cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Please let's talk about the interesting bits now.