Stock market volatility was extremely high during the Great Depression relative to any other period in American history. At the same time, large negative and positive discontinuous jumps in stock returns can be detected using the Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2004) test for jumps in financial...

Outside of the recent past, excess reserves have only concerned policymakers in one other period: the Great Depression. The data show that excess reserves in the 1930s were never actively unwound through a reduction in the monetary base. Nominal economic growth swelled required reserves while an...