The economic historian Charles P. Kindleberger states that Strong was one of the few US policymakers interested in the troubled financial affairs of Europe in the 1920s and that had he not died in 1928, just a year before the Great Depression, he might have been able to maintain stability in the international financial system. However, the economist Murray Rothbard claimed that it was Strong's manipulations that caused the Depression in the first place. The author Bill Bryson specifically recounts that Strong's insistence on cutting the Fed's discount rate 0.5% in 1927, made US President Herbert Hoover furious, fueled the market bubble of 1928, and led to the disastrous market collapse in 1929.