The Great Depression started as a recession among the working men in the 1920’s, and then deepened as a result of the calamity of the 1929 crash. The current recession parallels that one, in that the mavens of finance were so intoxicated by their wizardry that they hardly noticed the recession. Calvin Coolidge obviously noticed, so he did not “choose to run,” and left the mess to the well-intentioned technocrat, Herbert Hoover, who, like our current well-intentioned President, turned to the very wizards who had made the mess to bail him out. (Brilliant!) Hoover then created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which, like the current Council of Economic Advisors, continued the very same policies that had caused the collapse in the first place. That’s when serendipity entered the picture via the canniness of FDR, who simply used the existing RFC as a platform for programs that worked (CCC, WPA, etc.) They worked because those programs addressed the original problem: the working men’s recession of the 1920’s.