Great Depression in the United States
The Great Depression began in August 1929, when the United States economy first went into an economic recession. Although the country spent two months with declining GDP, it was not until the Wall Street Crash in October 1929 that the effects of a declining economy were felt, and a major worldwide economic downturn ensued. The stock market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth as well as for personal advancement. Altogether, there was a general loss of confidence in the economic future.
Great Depression
Between 1933 and 1939, federal expenditure tripled, and Roosevelt's critics charged that he was turning America into a socialist state. The Great Depression was a main factor in the implementation of social democracy and planned economies in European countries after World War II (see Marshall Plan). Keynesianism generally remained the most influential economic school in the United States and in parts of Europe until the periods between the 1970s and the 1980s, when Milton Friedman and other neoliberal economists formulated and propagated the newly created theories of neoliberalism and incorporated them into the Chicago School of Economics as an alternative approach to the study of economics. Neoliberalism went on to challenge the dominance of the Keynesian school of Economics in the mainstream academia and policy-making in the United States, having reached its peak in popularity in the election of the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.