Here is an article (with notes) about the fed chairman during the time of the Great Depression and what he thought caused it. It appears that the same thing is happening again for the same reasons. Please read:

In Review: America’s Most Egalitarian Banker
Marriner S. Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
At the start of the Great Depression, Marriner Eccles hardly seemed someone who might lead a charge against the economic orthodoxies that justified grand hoards of private fortune. By the early 1930s, after all, the Utah-born Eccles had become the top banker in the Mountain West, the organizer of the first multibank holding company in the United States.
But Eccles had also come to understand, after watching the great speculative bubbles of the 1920s pop into massive misery, that prosperity — to endure — needs to be shared. Eccles began speaking out on that theme, shortly after the Great Depression began, and soon caught the attention of the early New Dealers.
In 1933, Eccles would become an assistant secretary of the treasury. A year later, Franklin Roosevelt would appoint him to the Federal Reserve Board. He would become Board chair in 1935 and remain in that central position for the next 13 years. No one individual, over those years, had more of an impact on economic policy in the United States.
Looking back on those years, in his 1951 memoir Beckoning Frontiers, Eccles would do his best to explain the impact he set out to make. Mass production, he noted at the outset, demands mass consumption, but people can’t afford to consume if the wealth an economy generates is concentrating at the top.
In the years leading up to the Great Depression, that concentrating was accelerating. A “giant suction pump,” charged Eccles, “had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth.”
“In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” Eccles observed, “the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.”
Sound familiar? The decade of the 1920s that Eccles describes in his 1951 memoir comes across today as eerily familiar. Then as now, the U.S. economy was floating on a sea of debt.
Then as now, inequality was hollowing out the nation. Eccles put the matter bluntly: “Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product — in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups — we should have had far greater stability in our economy.”
How would Eccles have reacted to our current debt-ridden, war-torn economy? We can’t, of course, know for sure what Eccles would do. But we do know what he did. In 1942, during World War II, a high-powered team of New Deal officials that included Eccles proposed to President Roosevelt that “a ceiling of fifty thousand dollars after taxes should be placed on individual incomes.”
In our current dollars, this $50,000 ceiling would equal about $700,000. What did FDR do with the Eccles proposal? He turned around and asked Congress to place a 100 percent tax on all individual income over $25,000.
Congress would eventually set the nation’s top tax rate at 94 percent on all income over $200,000, and that top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the greatest period of middle class prosperity in U.S. economic history.
In 2005, the latest year with statistics available, America’s leading hedge fund managers and the rest of the nation’s top 400 income-earners faced a top tax rate of 35 percent. They actually paid, after loopholes, just 18.2 percent of their incomes in tax.
Marriner Eccles would not approve.
Stat of the Week
In the two decades between 1986 and 2005, America’s top 1 percent of taxpayers saw their share of the nation’s income jump from 11.3 to 21.2 percent. Over those same years, the federal income taxes the top 1 percent paid dropped by an equally stunning margin, from 33.13 percent of total personal income in 1986 to 23.13 percent in 2005, the most current year with IRS stats available. Taxpayers needed to report at least $364,657 in 2005 to enter the top 1 percent.
About Too Much
Too Much is published by the Council on International and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research and education group founded in 1954. Office: Suite 3C, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017. E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org

Notes
Eccles explained, “A policy of adequate governmental outlays at a time when private enterprise is curtailing its expenditures does not reflect a preference for an unbalanced budget. It merely reflects a desire and the need to put idle men, money and material to work. As they are put to work, and as private enterprise is stimulated to absorb the unemployed, the budget can and should be brought into balance, to offset the danger of a boom on the upswing, just as an unbalanced budget could help counteract a depression on a downswing.”
But Eccles envisioned a plan that would not only help the disadvantaged but would at the same time stimulate the economy. As always, he believed that “a maximum amount of private spending should be stimulated by a minimum amount of public spending.”

With all due respect to Mr. Stone and his glowing endorsement of Twitter, I’m still finding greed, narcissism, egotism, not to mention homophobia, racism, and all those glorious human traits just as prevalent, despite his newest tool.

Oh, I forgot. The grand evolution is slated to happen next week.

The best solution for the present economic crisis would be a REBOOT or restart of the entire debt system for the ENTIRE WORLD.

1. A data base listing ALL DEBT, government, business and personal needs to be created. The list would need to list the debt and debt holder with a bank that could make an accounting of the debt. Included would be all national debt of all nations, all mortgages car notes and credit cards for individuals. All outstanding bond and other debt for corporations, The idea is to list ALL DEBT of any kind owed.

2. Every government on the planet would need to call a special session of its legislature.
Using the same authority that governments have to use or create FIAT CURRENCY the legislatures and Central Banks need to authorize the creation of ACCOUNT CREDIT in an amount equal to all the listed debts in the world.

3. The Various governments and Central Banking Systems then need to make an accounting change equal to the debt in the form of an ACCOUNT CREDIT or CREDIT zeroing out ALL THE DEBT in the entire world, and crediting all debt-holders in the world.

The following day the economy of the entire world would restart and the Stock Markets of the world would react to the new renewed capital in the banking systems, the Capital now available to restart all business and the disposable income to the individual people would restart and grow the retail sectors and the manufacturing sectors of the entire world.

Some have commented that if this was done in a very short time the exact problem would be repeated. My answer to this idea is history does recycle and repeat itself but some do learn and avoid making the same mistake. Europe learned after WWII and has avoided a major repeat for more than sixty years.

The other objection has been the possible inflation that would result would weaken the dollar. My answer to the weakened dollar is it may be a GOOD thing to help our ability to export manufactured products and also make our manufactured products more competitive in our own country. Jobs are needed for our own citizens especially the bottom forty percent.
Allen Charles Report
http://allencharlesreport.blogspot.com/

Speaking of history, and why I so appreciate your post. I’m listening to Nick Taylor’s http://www.nicktaylor.us/ “The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: American Made (When FDR Put the Nation to Work) on CD in my travels for work. So much of the book parallels what’s happening at our current historical juncture.

Hoover, much like GWB, was clueless about life in America for the other 99 percent. Rather than address the growing joblessness, hunger, and destitution, Hoover incredibly, in 1932, makes the following statement to the press about the economic vortex America was sinking into: “What Americans need is a good joke every ten days.” (my paraphrase) Talk about disconnected. He also was obsessed about deficit spending, along with his Republican cohorts in Congress. Then, along came FDR. While no man/administration is perfect, he recognized the hopelessness and dire straits of the times and put Americans back to work and gave them hope again.

Think you could find a Limbaugh groupie (or a follower of Obama) that could put our current mess into any kind of historical context?

Hey, not all the faces are white … looks like a good time! What a joyous reason to celebrate. I can just imagine the noise … and the laughter … and the hoots. Now the real work begins, eh.
DoD