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America's Great Depression: Benjamin Bernanke
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In the Wall Street Journal, Greg Ip summarises some of Bernanke's views on the Great Depression. On top of the list: "Beware of outdated orthodoxies such as the gold standard." You see, to the world-improver set, confident they can push the right buttons and pull the right levers, the gold standard is nothing more than a straitjacket. To those who see gold's charms, that is precisely its chief merit. The gold standard checks the creation of new money. If every dollar must be backed by a certain amount of gold, then you cannot create money out of thin air. The gold standard says you must have the gold first.
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(The classic work is Murray N. Rothbard's America's Great Depression, Richardson & Snyder, New York City. There is ... Benjamin M. Anderson's Economics and the Public Welfare, LibertyPress, Indianapolis 1979. Then there is Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Harper Collin 2007).
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Other excellent books on the economics of the Great Depression include the rigorous 1996 "Golden Fetters" by Barry Eichengreen and Harold James. Another groundbreaking book on the economics of the Great Depression was the 1973 "A World in Depression" by Charles Kindleberger that focused on the international aspects (including the gold standard) and presents a sharply different interpretation than Rothbard, but Bernanke's book is even better.
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Benjamin Bernanke