The presidency of Herbert Hoover began on March 4, 1929, when Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as President of the United States, and ended on March 4, 1933. Hoover, a Republican, took office after a landslide victory in the 1928 presidential election over Democrat Al Smith of New York. Hoover favored policies in which government, business, and labor worked together to achieve economic prosperity, but he generally opposed a direct role for the federal government in the economy. Seeking to address an ongoing farm crisis, Hoover signed the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929. Banks played a major role in enabling this speculation, as by 1929 commercial banks were loaning more money for investments in real estate or the stock market than for commercial enterprises. Some regulators and bankers, like George L. Harrison and George Fisher Baker, recognized the danger that speculation posed to the economy, and in 1927 Baker had warned Coolidge and Hoover that a failure to curb speculation would lead to 'one of the greatest financial catastrophes that this country has ever seen.'