Long Depression
Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, author of "A Monetary History of the United States", on the other hand, blamed this prolonged economic crisis on the imposition of a new gold standard, part of which he referred to by its traditional name, The Crime of 1873. This forced shift into a currency whose supply was limited by nature, unable to expand with demand, caused a series of economic and monetary contractions that plagued the entire period of the Long Depression. Murray Rothbard, in his book "History of Money and Banking of the United States", argues that the long depression was only a misunderstood recession since real wages and production were actually increasing throughout the period. Like Friedman, he attributes falling prices to the resumption of a deflationary gold standard in the U.S. after the Civil War.
Financial contagion
One of the biggest worldwide crises was the stock market crash on Wall Street in October 1929. The failure from 1929–33 was foreshadowed by collapses in commodity prices in multiple emerging nations. The stock market boom in New York by 1928 choked off U.S. capital flows to central Europe and Latin America and precipitated currency crises in a number of countries (Australia, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil) and early in 1929. The Wall Street crash caused stock market scares globally. This is known as the Great Depression. The U.S. crisis in 1929 turned into the Great Depression by 1930 and 1931 because the Federal Reserve was unsuccessful at relieving multiple banking panics. The resultant collapse in prices and output worldwide forced sovereign borrowers to cut back on servicing their debts and then to default, precipitating a collapse of foreign lending in 1931.