The New York Stock Exchange plummeted, causing many banks and businesses to file bankruptcy. For example, many cite the September 1929 passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which placed high taxes on many imported items, as a major contributor to the market’s instability. In early 2000, the technology stock bubble crashed spectacularly as the Nasdaq plunged from 5,000 to nearly 1,000 by 2002 and the U.S. economy was hurled into a recession. Last year, Lombard Street Research’s Dario Perkins compared the effect on GDP from both the dot-com stock market crash of 2000 and the sub-prime-mortgage crisis of 2007-2008. The…