Perhaps the worst economic downturn in the history of the United States occurred from 1930-1939. The Great Depression led to domestic and international crises effecting the poor and wealthy alike. Many financial experts today continue to debate the cause of The Depression, although most agree that several events led to the economic decline. The famous stock market crash on October 29, 1929 is just one of many causes economists believe led to The Great Depression. Known also as Black Tuesday, October 29th left stockholders shattered with recorded losses reaching $40 billion dollars (Kelly, n.d.).
The Great Depression devastates national economies, threw millions out of work, and contributed to the outburst of World War II. In Seattle and King County, the Depression resulted in tens of thousands unemployed and underemployed, the recurrence of organized labor, and a redefinition of state politics. The most stable symbols of the hard times were the shanty towns called Hoovervilles, thrown up by the homeless. The improvement programs under the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a collection of public works projects from parks to dams to public housing. The tough times finished with the rapid growth in employment and government spending for World War
Collectivisation was introduced by Mao in 1958, in 1958 production rate of food was at 200 million tonnes, but by 1960 the production rate had fallen to 143.5 million. Within 2 years one of Mao’s own policies had caused a fall in production rate of 56.5 million. Despite the figures Mao insisted that many peasants were growing more food than necessary and keeping some for themselves, Mao accused the peasants of being ‘inherently capitalist’ and that they were against being a part of a communist state. The policy of collectivisation contributed hugely to the scale of the famine; the peasants resented the change as they didn’t have enough land to farm their crops, on top of this the authorities believed that they needed to be ‘strictly controlled and directed’. This attitude towards the peasants amplified the issues of collectivisation and caused scale of the famine to worsen.
Starting in the year 1929 and lasting throughout the 1930’s, America was brought into the worst economic slump that America and the rest of the world has ever been brought into. This would soon be known as The Great Depression. What caused this depression was the crash of the stock market in 1929 and almost all of the Americans had to suffer from the stock market crash. People were without jobs, homeless, and left without nothing but their families and the clothes on their back. Some of the hardships that the Americans faced were unbearable.
Only six months after Hoover took office, the economy collapsed and the Great Depression began. Many factors caused and contributed to the Great Depression of 1929. One factor would be the overproductions of many goods in the 1920s led to worker layoffs Another factor was that easy credit led to people spending more than they had, and it led to a rapid inflation that eventually caused people to stop buying. The Federal Reserve Bank, created in 1913, did a poor job which also led to the great depression. It did not monitor interest rates to help regulate the economy when overproduction and inflation had started to cause unemployment in 1928-29 and the economy seemed likely headed toward collapse.
Unequal distribution of wealth in 1920, high tariffs and war debts, overproduction in industry and agriculture, and the stock market crash are just a few of the reasons that will be discussed in the following paragraphs. International trade with Europe and Germany is also said to have caused the depression many of our parents and/or grandparents faced as children. The Great Depression is held responsible for a dramatic change in the structure of American politics, as well. The stock market crash is
Great Depression The Great Depression was a global economic crisis that started in the early 1920s. This crisis leaded a depression around many nations and many young people. On October 29, 1929 there was a crash of the New York exchanges. The credit dropped rapidly after people kept on spending money, when they didn’t have any money. The stock market crashed rapidly, and took a big hit to the U.S. economy.
Businesses and factories shut down, banks failed, farm income dropped. By November 1932, 20 percent of Americans were unemployed. The presidential campaign that year was chie y a debate over the causes of the Great Depression and ways to reverse it. Incumbent Herbert Hoover had started the process of rebuilding the economy, but his e orts had little impact, and he lost the election to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was infectiously optimistic and was ready to use federal authority to achieve bold remedies.
Most often used starting date of the great depression was the stock market crash on October twenty ninth nineteen twenty nine, also known as black Tuesday. The great depression lasted for about ten years which ninety thousand businesses were lost completely, twenty thousand people committed suicide, and fifteen million people lost their jobs and the ones who got to keep theirs the wages were cut by more than half.
It brought devastation to the United States’ economy, as well as actual “depression” to the American public. Various issues caused the fall of the most prosperous country in the world such as, the accumulation of installment loans and lack of government agencies regulating the stock market. Throughout the 1930’s, the American government and its people dealt with the depression in numerous ways. Herbert Hoover was the