The Causes of the Great Crash of 1929

What caused the Great Crash of 1929?

1. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff had important disruptive effects. (Tariffs in general are a bad idea.)
2. Few people knew exactly what form those disruptive effects would take. (Sounds like most bills Congress passes especially if they are real complex.)
3. Unknown to anyone at the time, the Federal Reserve made the harmful effects even worse though its policy of deflation. (Has the Fed done anything right, really?)
4. President Herbert Hoover tried to prop up farm prices, creating another new federal agency with the Agriculture Marketing Act of 1929. (Yes, this Republican was a Progressive. He followed the Keynesian knee-jerk response of using big gov’t to try to solve problems.)
5. Hoover taxed [my emphasis] bank checks. (WTF?!) This accelerated the decline in the availability of money by penalizing people for writing checks.
6. The Hoover admin. created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). It provided $2 billion in funds for financial institutions that were teetering on the brink. Federal regulations required publications of the names of businesses and banks receiving RFC loans. This sent depositors scrambling to remove their money, weakening the banks even further.
7. Hoover then signed the largest peacetime tax increase in history. A sales tax at that. (That was basically the last nail in the coffin.)

Source: A Patriot's History of The United States.