The Great Crisis

Although the tax treatment of stock marketstock market gains helped to drive up prices by discouraging sales during bull marketsmarkets, the economic boom of the 1920s was primarily premised on the promise that a “New Era” had arrived. The Federal ReserveFederal Reserve System and governmentgovernment regulatorsregulations had forever ended the boom-and-bust cycle of the nineteenth century, except in the wake of massive upheavals like a Great WarWorld War I followed by a Great Pandemicpandemic. This boom was truly different from earlier ones, pundits exclaimed, because new technologies, better governance, and never-ending peace were bound to bring inexorable progress.