Things would have fallen apart, institutions would have closed their doors, competent people would have bought up the pieces and the recovery would be well under way.. that is historically what happens in a crisis when there is no intervention at all. The intervention in the 1930's prolonged the bad economy. The rest of the world that didn't intervene so much recovered way before the USA did..
Hey, laissez faire. Oligopoly, leveraged speculation with risk transferred to insuring entities, then leveraged speculation on that insurance, was a purely free market phenomenon. Systemic risk will always be there when there are short term incentives for that behavior.
Ya think? Considering they pretty much sent the whole god damn world into bankruptcy, yeah, some of them should have gone to jail. Instead they got sweetheart loan deals to regroup, and do it all over again.
It began in October, 1929 and by the time a Democrat came along in March, 1933, the banking system was dead. That's three and a half years of this non-interventionist bs that we had to go through that time. Because of the Internet and the my-balls-are-bigger-than-your-balls idiot posts calling for the economic nuking of everything, when the next Republican gets in, it'll be (xxxxx) fill in the number of years before someone, of either party, will be able to get in and do something. I used to think these guys were jokes - well, intellectually they still are utter, complete, ignorant-of-history morons - but because of the loudness of their idiocy their "thinking" has infected the real world, and now you can seriously look forward to the next crisis being the one where this approach, if you can call it that, will be used, with the same effect it had the last time it was used. Their fave is to point out with FDR that unemployment continued to be high (as they keep doing this time around; they never change). They forget the economy had ground to a complete halt when he was inaugurated, after, one more time, three and one half years of trying their approach. This time the economy didn't get a chance to grind to a halt, it just came close, which gives these fools enough wiggle room to make their ridiculous claims. No manner of proof can be offered that will ever convince these people. Only making them as actually bankrupt as they already are intellectually will change their minds - maybe. You can never tell.