<P>... leads us to believe that recovery is sound only if it does come of itself . For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatening business with another (worse) crisis ahead . </P> <P> Despite liquidationist expectations, a large proportion of the capital stock was not redeployed and vanished during the first years of the Great Depression . According to a study by Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers, the recession caused a drop of net capital accumulation to pre-1924 levels by 1933 . </P> <P> Economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman suggested that the do - nothing policy prescription which resulted from the liquidationist theory contributed to deepening the Great Depression . With the rhetoric of ridicule Keynes tried to discredit the liquidationist view in presenting Hayek, Robbins and Schumpeter as </P> <P>... austere and puritanical souls (who) regard (the Great Depression)... as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on so much "overexpansion" as they call it...It would, they feel, be a victory for the mammon of unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced by universal bankruptcy . We need, they say, what they politely call a' prolonged liquidation' to put us right . The liquidation, they tell us, is not yet complete . But in time it will be . And when sufficient time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be well with us again...</P>

Which was not a factor generally accepted as contributing to the great depression