Causes of the Great Depression
In their 1963 book "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960", Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz laid out their case for a different explanation of the Great Depression. Essentially, the Great Depression, in their view, was caused by the fall of the money supply. Friedman and Schwartz write: "From the cyclical peak in August 1929 to a cyclical trough in March 1933, the stock of money fell by over a third." The result was what Friedman and Schwartz called "The Great Contraction" — a period of falling income, prices, and employment caused by the choking effects of a restricted money supply. Friedman and Schwartz argue that people wanted to hold more money than the Federal Reserve was supplying. As a result, people hoarded money by consuming less. This caused a contraction in employment and production since prices were not flexible enough to immediately fall. The Fed's failure was in not realizing what was happening and not taking corrective action. In a speech honoring Friedman and Schwartz, Ben Bernanke stated:
Causes of unemployment in the United States
During the Great Depression, "hard core" structural unemployment was very common. Hard-core unemployment refers to individuals that have been unemployed for a prolonged period of time (i.e. six months, over a year). The hard core unemployment phenomenon present in the 1930s is believed to be caused by not only the depression, but also a shift in business personnel policies. In the 1920s, businessmen found the most profitable wage to be the "efficiency wage", one that attracted more productive workers. This resulted in new policies designed to find trained, efficient workers, and to encourage other workers to become more like them.