Interwar austerity policies helped precipitate the 1929 crash.

Evidence

Th e dramatic events of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression that followed have attracted no shortage of scholarly attention, a focus that has obscured some of the political and ideological dynamics of the years before the Depression and following the Great War. Th e choice to focus this book on the early 1920s to the exclusion of later years does not take away from this period’s relevance to understanding the Depression; as readers will fi nd, a study of austerity serves to untangle the precipitating factors that promoted the crash and exacerbated the Depression. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1619

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the precise mechanism by which early-1920s austerity exacerbated the Depression — a causal chain the reader could reconstruct.
• XREF: connects to: Japanese austerity produced depression, assassination, and militarism. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 544; Interwar austerity deepened depressions and helped cause the Second World War — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 555; Austerity in the 1930s contributed directly to global catastrophe. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 69 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Austerity reversed postwar labor income gains in both Italy and Britain by 1929 #corroborates (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1486
• British monetary austerity after 1920 produced an unhealthy quasi-equilibrium for a full decade #qualifies (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1731