The prospect of an FDR administration set indicators back during the interregnum period, to be sure. But here are a few of the stats we have:

Mid-1932 through September, index of industrial production +21%

Rail freight loadings +20%

Construction contract awards +30%

Cotton textile mill manufacturing, from 56% capacity to 97%, July to October

AFL’s numbers on industrial unemployment dropped by nearly 750,000 between July and October

Bank failures down sharply

Walter Lippmann (not a free-market guy, obviously): “There is very good statistical evidence…that as a purely economic phenomenon the world depression reached its low point in mid-summer 1932 and that in all the leading countries a very slow but nevertheless real recovery began.”