Last night I read Roy Davidson’s “Austrian Business Cycle Theory: An Application to New Zealand’s Recent Boom and Bust”. It was a good paper and basically follows Rothbard’s pattern in America’s Great Depression by describing Austrian Business Cycle Theory, examining the policies and statistics from the years leading up to the recession, and then outlining a few policies that should be applied moving forward.
My question though is what caused the Great Depression in New Zealand? The Reserve Bank of New Zealand wasn’t established until 1934. I understand credit bubbles are inherent in fractional reserve banking, so was this all it was with the wrong remedy applied? I.e. was the late 1920s New Zealand’s equivalent of America’s Panic of 1907? If it was caused by fractional reserve banking, why did it coincide so much with the depression in America? I’ve understood fractional reserve banking induced busts without central banks as being more locally confined and independent of other locations.
