President Hoover's term endured stock market
bears in all four of his years.
As you can see from the above chart, those bears were record setting.
Hoovers' ideas sounded good. He promoted
greater efficiencies in government. He did not understand that is
impossible. He made a fortune in the private sector. He must have assumed
the same worker output potential existed in the public sector. His naiveté
contributed, somewhat, to his inability to turn the economy around.
Tactically, raising the top tax bracket from
25% to 63% during these horrible years was pretty stupid, furthering the
depth of economic depression.
Hoover, however, was figuring it out near the
end of his term, according to General Motor's CEO, Alfred P. Sloan.
According to Sloan, President Hoovers' policies would work. Unfortunately,
the American voters were not as sharp as Sloan and ousted Hoover in 1932.
Finally, notice the comment on top of the
chart above, where a prominent Harvard economist predicted the bull would
resume a few weeks after the crash of 1929. The intellectual elite have
not improved since then, but they have learned to pontificate about
non-quantitative conclusions. That prevents them being caught at their
stupidity. Just listen to the contemporary so-called elites. They talk,
using fancy language, but saying nothing of substance and always without
any proof of their claims.
