While John Maynard Keynes was busy blaming capitalism for the Great Depression, Friedrich Hayek published Prices and Production in 1931 and explained exactly what the Federal Reserve had actually done to cause it. Central banks expand credit, artificially lowering interest rates below their natural market level. Entrepreneurs, reading cheap credit as a signal that real savings exist, pour capital into long-term projects: factories, infrastructure, heavy production. They borrow at 3% and build accordingly. The Fed manufactured that 3% from thin air between 1921 and 1928. No corresponding pool of genuine savings backed it. Hayek called this the boom phase. Malinvestment compounds quietly while the party runs. Then reality arrives. The credit expansion cannot continue indefinitely without hyperinflation, so the central bank tightens. Interest rates climb toward their real level. Suddenly those long-term capital projects that penciled out at 3% are bleeding money. Entrepreneurs liquidate. Unemployment spikes. The structure of production snaps back violently toward what actual consumer preferences and genuine savings could support. This is the bust. The depression is the cure, not the disease. Keynes looked at that same wreckage in 1936 and prescribed more government spending, more credit, more of the exact poison that caused the seizure. Every dollar of "stimulus" the Roosevelt administration injected after 1933 delayed the necessary liquidation and extended the Depression by years. The unemployment rate still sat at 17.2% in 1939, a full decade in. Hayek handed policymakers the correct diagnosis. They hired a different doctor because his prescription required them to do less, spend less, and control less.