Topic: John Steinbeck

1 chapters across the catalog

The Federal Reserve is criticized for allowing 10,000 small banks to fail during the Great Depression, which led to the mass destitution of American farmers. While the Fed was marketed as a "lender of last resort," it allegedly used the crisis to concentrate power into a few large, privately-owned New York banks. This era is described as a period where honest citizens lost their land and savings while their debts remained.