Part I Developments at the National Level, 4 Crisis Management

I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking. I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be. …We had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people’s funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was of course not true in the vast majority of our banks but it was true in enough of them to shock the people for a time into a sense of...