Smoot-Hawley and Austerity

One other quick note on Evan Thomas’ piece in the NYT today which I commented on here – in it, he mentions the Smoot-Hawley tariffs imposed by Congress as being a misguided populist policy that contributed to the Great Depression. And there is no doubt that those tariffs did contribute and extend the length of the depression.  But Smoot-Hawley was a reaction to the depression, not a cause of it.  The parallel to today’s times is not Trump’s talk of tariffs, but the move to austerity after the financial collapse that protected and continues to protect the asset holders over the general populace. Austerity has prolonged and, in Europe at least, deepened the recession and it is a policy that was adopted and is supported primarily by the elite establishment.