Crimes far worse than murder

Galbraith writes:
Hoover was elected in a landslide. This, were the speculators privy to Mr. Hoover's mind, should have cause a heavy fall in the market. In his memoirs Mr. Hoover states that as early as 1925 he became concerned over the "growing tide of speculation." During the months and years that followed this concern gradually changed to alarm, and then to something only slightly less than a premonition of total disaster. "There are crimes," Mr. Hoover said of speculation, "far worse than murder for which men should be reviled and punished." As Secretary of Commerce [under President Coolidge] he had sought nothing so much as to get the market under control.

Mr. Hoover's attitude toward the market was, however, an exceptionally well-kept secret. People did not know of his efforts, uniformly frustrated by Coolidge and the Federal Reserve Board, to translate his thoughts into action. The news of his election, so far from causing a panic, set off the greatest increase in buying [ of stocks ] to date.

Who will be our Hoover, our secretly-frustrated woulda' been unsung hero, who instead of being tarred with supposedly helping to cause the Panic should have been enabled to prevent the bubble(s) that led to the Panic and downturn? Only time will tell, although we can surely cross a few names off the list now, like those of Greenspan, Bernanke, Rubin, Summers, and Paulson, Cox, Pitt, and, sadly because he strikes me as a man of great decency and generally superb judgement, Arthur Leavitt. I'm not sure about Paul O'Neill or Bill Donaldson. Certainly on the surface O'Neill may merit some consideration for his robust ability to annoy his bosses during the early years of the Bush II regime.

And what about speculation and 'crimes far worse than murder? ' Did Hoover have a point, or was he just dramatically evincing the bitterness that comes with looking back in deep sorrow and frustration at one's own failures? I think Hoover had a legitimate point: you can kill people in many ways, say, by starving them to death instead of shooting them, as Mr. Stalin and henchmen demonstrated so tragically in the Ukraine during the 1930s. (Hoover knew this better than most --- prior to serving Coolidge as Secretary of Commerce he led the US famine relief effort in Russia in the early 1920s.) And there is no doubt too the Great Depression did in more than just the few broken speculators who jumped during the Crash of '29. If this Panic of 2008 spins out of control --- and no one in their right mind wants it to do so --- people will starve to death, somewhere, as a direct result of economic activity needlessly reduced by the modern-day equivalent of the speculation Hoover so detested.