The Federal Reserve, which isn't federal - but private whose shareholders are unknown - and has never been fully audited since its inception in 1913 caused the Great Depression by using the same playbook that's being repeated today. By making cheap money available everyone piled into assets during the 1920s, then when they had corralled enough of the something-for-nothing chumps they contracted the money supply following years of expanding it. All the weak hands sold their shares, ditto for those who defaulted on their inflated homes so that the banksters swooped to collect their assets for peanuts.