It’s been a kick digging up all these lost books by Garet Garrett. What amazing insight he had in economics and politics! It turns out that he wrote a book in 1932 called The Bubble that Broke the World, now online. It is as the title suggests: a full scale analysis of the stock market crash, which he blames not on capitalism and market-driven excess but on credit expansion by the Fed. There are few paragraphs in here in which he even presents an outline of the Austrian theory of the trade cycle, though not by that name.
What I find remarkable about this: it demonstrates that the real cause of the cause was known by contemporaries, not only in scholarly circles but also in popular publishing. This book was a big deal, and widely circulated. The New Deal came along and seemed to wipe out any explanations other than the Keynesian one so that the credit cycle explanation had to make a second come back in the 1960s.
