John J. Raskob on stocks for the long run (1929)

If a man saves $15 a week and invests in good common stocks,  at the end of twenty years he will have at least $80,000 and an income from investments of around $400 a month.  He will be rich.

~ John J. Raskob, chairman of the Democratic Party, "Everybody Ought to Be Rich: An Interview with John J. Raskob," Ladies' Home Journal, article written by Samuel Crowther, August 1929

Herbert Hoover: "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land" (1928)

Unemployment in the sense of distress is widely disappearing…We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poor-house is vanishing from among us. We have not reached the goal, but given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation. There is no guarantee against poverty equal to a job for every man. That is the primary purpose of the economic policies we advocate.

~ Herbert Hoover, from his speech accepting the Republican Party nomination for President, August 11, 1928

Irving Fisher endorses presidential candidate Herbert Hoover (1928)

Mr. Hoover is a practical economist and one to whom is due more largely than to any other one man improvement in our prosperity...  Mr. Hoover knows as few men do the terrible evils of inflation and deflation, and the need of avoiding both if business and agriculture are to be stabilized.

~ Irving Fisher, July 29, 1928

Ralph Hawtrey on the American experiment of stabilizing the price level

The American experiment in stabilization from 1922 to 1928 showed that early treatment could shake a tendency either to inflation or to depression in a few months, before any serious damage had been done.  The American experiment was a great advance upon the practice of the 19th century.

~ Ralph G. Hawtrey, British Treasury's Director of Financial Studies, The Art of Central Banking (1932), p. 300

(Murray Rothbard describes Hawtrey as "one of the evil geniuses of the 1920s" in America's Great Depression, p. 159.)

Time's Justin Fox on Irving Fisher, "the country's first great economist"

[Irving] Fisher was the country's first great economist, a pioneer of the mathematical approach that came to dominate the discipline after his death. Fisher saw the behavior of the market in rational, mathematical terms. He wasn't completely doctrinaire about this--earlier in his career, he had allowed that investors sometimes behaved like sheep. But in the 1920s, convinced that skilled monetary management at the Federal Reserve and the rise of new, professionally run investment trusts had reduced the riskiness of markets, he lulled himself into believing that the prices prevailing on Wall Street were a reflection of economic reality and not of investor mania or a credit bubble.

~ Justin Fox, Time, "The Myth of the Rational Market," June 22, 2009

Irving Fisher sees no crash in stock prices (1929)

There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash.  Dividend returns on stocks are moving higher.  This is not due to receding prices for stocks, and will not be hastened by any anticipated crash, the possibility of which I fail to see.

A few years ago people were as much afraid of common stocks as they were of a red-hot poker. In the popular mind there was a tremendous risk in common stocks. Why? Mainly because the average investor could afford to invest in only one common stock. Today he obtains wide and well managed diversification of stock holding by purchasing shares in good investment trusts.

~ Irving Fisher, September 5, 1929 (two days after the peak of the bull market according to Robert Murphy, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal)

Friedrich Hayek on monetary policy from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s

We must not forget that, for the last six or eight years monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown. 

~ Friedrich Hayek, 1932

Margit von Mises on her husband's concern about a great crash coming in the late 1920s

One day Lu told me he had been offered a high position at the Credit Anstalt, the foremost banking institution in Vienna, but that he had decided not to accept it. When I asked him the reason for his refusal, he told me that a great ‘crash’ would be coming and that he did not want his name in any way connected with it. He preferred to write and teach.

~ Margit von Mises, My Years With Ludwig von Mises, pp. 23-24

Harold Evans: JP Morgan's influence on Calvin Coolidge

The great banking house of JP Morgan had the president [Calvin Coolidge] on a "preferred list" by which the bank's influential friends were given a chance to buy stock at half price. Shall we say, they made out like bandits?

~ Harold Evans, "Banker + gangster = bankster," BBC, January 30, 2009

Financial World: Fed can always stimulate business (1929)

It may be well again to stress the all-important point that the Federal Reserve has it in its power to change interest rates downward any time it sees fit to do so and thus to stimulate business. 

~ The Financial World, April 10, 1929

Irving Fisher's "permanently high plateau" (1929)

Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel that there will soon, if ever, be a fifty or sixty point break below present values, such as Mr. Babson predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher than it is today within a few months.

~ Irving Fisher, October 16, 1929