Government Intervention: It's Not What You Do It's What You Have the Courage to Undo.

The good news is that economic intervention does not a speech make.  The bad news is that a speech does nothing to clear up regime uncertainty.

“There have been endless analyses of individual economic policies; there has been little attention to changes in policy regimes.”—PETER TEMIN

Here's another excerpt from Higgs' essay on "Regime Uncertainty" during the great depression.

...economic historians only echo the observations of one of America’s leading investors, Lammot du Pont, in 1937:

Uncertainty rules the tax situation, the labor situation, the monetary situation, and practically every legal condition under which industry must operate.  Are taxes to go higher, lower or stay where they are? We don’t know.  Is labor to be union or nonunion?… Are we to have inflation or deflation, more government spending or less?… Are new restrictionsto be placed on capital, new limits on profits?… It is impossibleto even guess at the answers. (quoted in Krooss 1970, 200)