Indeed, the second depression beginning in 1937 had nothing to do with fiscal policy or regulation — it matches precisely with the Federal Reserve’s tightening of interest rates and amnesic reduction of open market purchases.

But also the sterilization of gold purchases. The gold standard may not have been responsible for the 1930 depression, but it appears to have played an important part in the 1937 fiaco. Monetary policy is essentially a technology, a way of doing things. By 1929 the technologies of production and, therefore, the economy's capacity to meet new money with new supply, had outstripped the technology of creating that new money. Old thinking, and, at the particular micro level, good old anti-semitism, combined to cause a particular bank to fail and spark a particular kind of depression, but eventually, I suspect a deflationary spiral would have killed the gold standard after a different period of economic pain.