Paul Valéry, writing in 1931, captured the zeitgeist well: 6 “Instead of, as in the past, playing an honest card game with fate, knowing the rules, knowing the number of cards and face cards, we are now in the position of a player who is astonished to discover that his adversary’s hand contains face cards never seen before, and that the rules of the game change with each hand.” As The Magazine of Wall Street put it a month after Black Thursday: 7 “Uncertainty is worse than knowing the truth, no matter how bad ”.
This was the psychological climate and state of mind Franklin Roosevelt was referring to when, in his inaugural address as President of the United States in 1933, he stated that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself ”. The economic literature confirms the uncertainty prevailing during those days.