Great Depression

"The economic crisis that began with the stock market crash in October 1929 paved the way for the most substantial permanent institutional change in the history of the United States. The expansion of government power over the individual and social life would make the responses to previous crises pale in comparison. It all began with a plummeting of stock-market values, a predictable (and predicted) consequence of the manipulation of money and credit by the Federal Reserve System, which was established less than 20 years earlier precisely to prevent money and banking crises."