Online article about the Great Depression

With the release of Robert Higgs' book Depression, War, and Cold War : Studies in Political Economy, I found an online article he wrote that covers part of that topic.

In Regime Uncertainty (subtitled "Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War") Higgs argues, among other things, that the uncertainty around FDR's New Deal programs and other proposals from his brain trust upset the capital markets sufficiently to retard any possible recovery. We know from hindsight that many of the central planning and nationalization schemes never saw the light of day. But during that period, there was sufficient doubt and uncertainty about what would come from those programs that the economy and investments were stifled. If you were the president of a company in an industry that the government talked of seizing or regulating to death, wouldn't your investments in the company tail off?

An interesting paper, complete with lots of data. The second part of the paper deals with whether the wartime years could be called a recovery. But the first section is what interested me. Higgs doesn't claim to replace previous theories on the contracting monitary policy, merely that they are insufficient.