Another way to lose weight would be to starve to death, which is what happened to many people the last time the Fed refused to devalue the currency (1929-1933).
To be fair, a massive ecological crisis (the dustbowl) and price controls on food (making it uneconomical to ship food to cities) also contributed to food shortages.
> price controls on food (making it uneconomical to ship food to cities) also contributed to food shortages.
You got the boundary on the price controls wrong. They mandated minimum prices, not maximum. The minimum was more than enough to pay for shipping, but it was higher than the amount people could afford.
FDR believed that the depression was caused by excess production. The federal govt destroyed food and other things to reduce supply in an effort to drive up prices.
That didn't stop until WWII was imminent, when it became obvious that the US couldn't be an "arsenal of democracy" if it wasn't producing as much as it could.
This war on production is what made the great depression "great", that is, long an deep.
To be fair, these FDR policies were extensions of what Hoover had done. Interestingly enough, FDR campaigned against them.
While price controls of food cause problems, they sound really good to voters when there is a recession, and thus they sound really good to politicians.
The great depression has NOTHING to do with the Greek crisis. The crash of 1929 was caused by the financial sector, not by a crushing national debt. In 1929 the US federal debt was less than 20% of GDP [1].
It's not because a looser monetary policy could have helped during the great depression that it will help in every situation.
