facing reality, page-36

A piece of Uncle Ben

The fourth and final policy mistake emphasized by Friedman and Schwartz was the Fed's ongoing neglect of problems in the U.S. banking sector. As I have already described, the banking sector faced enormous pressure during the early 1930s. As depositor fears about the health of banks grew, runs on banks became increasingly common. A series of banking panics spread across the country, often affecting all the banks in a major city or even an entire region of the country. Between December 1930 and March 1933, when President Roosevelt declared a "banking holiday" that shut down the entire U.S. banking system, about half of U.S. banks either closed or merged with other banks. Surviving banks, rather than expanding their deposits and loans to replace those of the banks lost to panics, retrenched sharply.

For full link:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200403022/default.htm

Except now THIS crisis is not being caused by demands for trading money for gold by speculators, this time it's the other way around. But the banks are still getting hammered and cannibalizing each other.
Bernanke is a fair-dinkum dud!