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The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.

No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.

War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system. We have seen that the Revolutionary War occasioned a mass of depreciated fiat paper, worthless Continentals, a huge public debt, and the beginnings of central banking in the Bank of North America.

Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future.

In the Great Depression, you bought something if you had the cash to buy it.

It's true that monetary policy was too lax for too long, and the government encouraged lending to people who were unlikely to repay their loans.

War has been good to me from a financial standpoint but I don't want to make money that way. I don't want blood money.

To my mind, the main reason for the Depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people.

I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.