The Great Depression lasted in America for at least ten years, but it took twenty-seven years to get the economy back above depression levels. To this day, the reasons that lead to the Great Depression are still being debated; although there are a few reasons that historians and ecoomics have agreed on. Such as, the stock market crash that occurred on October 29th of 1929. This happened when a few investors began selling their stocks, because they thought the bull market was going to end soon. The bull market was when prices were rising due to automobiles; steel was selling at a record high but was going down very fast.
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.).
Total losses for the four days: $30 billion, 10 times federal budget and more than the U.S. had spent in World War I ($32B estimated). The crash wiped out 40 percent of the paper value of common stock. Although this was a cataclysmic blow, most scholars do not believe that the stock market crash, alone, was sufficient to have caused the Great Depression. And the next possible cause is bank failure.In 1929, there were 25,568 banks in the United States; by 1933, there were only 14,771. Personal and corporate savings dropped from $15.3 billion in 1929 to $2.3 billion in 1933.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Success of His New Deal The American economy started weakening by the middle of the1920s. However, over investment and speculating in stocks inflated their prices that contributed to the delusion of a robust economy. Since stocks were the hottest commodity to invest in, people borrowed money and used their stocks as collateral to the banks.The Great Depression was considered started on Black Thursday October 24th, 1929 when the New York Stock Exchange collapsed in the greatest market crash with the Dow closed at 316.38, and the plunge continued until the Dow reached its low of 41.22 in 1932. When the stocks values dropped, people were not able to pay for their debts while the banks just held worthless collaterals. Many banks declared bankruptcies because they could not get back their money from stock investors.
The prices of the products will either increase or stay the same but the wages of the people will always decrease. Black Thursday…as it was remembered, October 24,1929, nearly 13 million shares of stock changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the prices dropped sharply causing great alarm in financial community. The next day, the President reassured the people that there’s no need to alarm because the economy was on sound footing. Days, weeks, months, and years passed people lived in poverty, there are people who are called as ‘hoovervilles’ that were blaming the President of their current living status. The
Quincy Terrell Mrs. Stevens English III 10 December 2010 American’s Greed Leads to Poverty Republican nominee Herbert Hoover shared some hopeful words with Americans in 1928. He said that the day was in sight “when poverty will be banished from this nation.” This turned out to be was wishful thinking. One percent of the richest families in America during this time received one fourth of all U.S. income (Brinkley2). Buying stocks on margin became very popular during the 1920s. People began to abuse this system to invest huge amounts of imaginary money that only existed on paper, which back fired when the prices of stocks began to fall and they did not have money to pay for the stocks purchased (Lonkevich4).
However, there was no unilateral view on how to tackle the Depression and so the Weimar Governments between the years of 1928 and 1933 went through 4 different Chancellors before Hitler and his Nazi Party finally took over in January 1933 with public support. During the Depression, millions of people lost their jobs and there was poverty, hunger and homelessness. Carr writes that “unemployment grew by leaps and bounds” whilst Lacey and Shephard note that “for the unemployed this was a time of extreme poverty”. Betwen 1930 and 1932, 18,000 farmers and 50,000 businesses had gone bankrupt. The depression reminded H. Hauser “of the war, of the worst period of starvation in 1917 and 1918, but even then people paid for potatoes”.
In a lecture by Professor Newman, it was made known of the concept “selling short”, meaning, big businessmen would try to make more money on a market they knew was going down, and with that came a lot of common people losing money. When prices started to collapse over 40 billion dollars’ worth of stock value suddenly disappeared, and so did people’s money. With this caused the famous stock market crash in 1929. Almost immediately big businessmen started shutting down factories and firing employees and the demand for products went down, and with that, unemployment reached 15 million. In the lecture, Professor Newman uses the example of steel to show how much stocks declined.
This regulation is considered effective because it will decrease the number of smokers, keeps humans healthy and increases taxes to balance tobacco related expenses. Firstly, by making the tobacco tax higher, it will decrease the numbers of smokers. When the tobacco tax increases, the cigarettes price will become more expensive. In other words, the smokers would spend lots of money for smoking. As quoted by Depkes RI, the Ministry of Health Republic of Indonesia, Indonesian smokers commonly spend Rp 198,761 per month for buying cigarettes in 2013.
In the months between the US elections, the economic state was at a low. Banks failed dramatically with 4,004 failing in the first couple of months in 1933. Roosevelt’s first priority was therefore restoring confidence in the banking system. Roosevelt closed all the banks in the US on the 5th of March 1933 because this was one of his ways of restoring trust and confidence on the banks. A short time after, Roosevelt opened the strongest banks and the weakest ones were still closed and helped with government loaning.