The correct answer is C) Americans were indulging in excess and deregulation during the 1920s, unaware this would contribute to an economic crisis.
The statement that best describes a central idea of the text is "Americans were indulging in excess and deregulation during the 1920s, unaware this would contribute to an economic crisis."
What happened in the 1920s was that people, including the middle class- had money to spend in necessary and unnecessary things; most of them using credit. The name for this period in the United States was "the Roaring 1920s," were consumerism and overspending marked these years until the US stock market crash of October 29, 1929, that generated the Great Depression.
