What was the main cause of the Great Depression?
The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941
The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 () is a 1984 history of the Great Depression by acclaimed historian Robert S. McElvaine. In this interpretive history, McElvaine discusses the causes and the results of the worst depression in American history, covering the time from 1929 to 1941. He examines the causes of this cataclysmic event, its impact upon the American people, and the political, governmental, and cultural responses to it. He comes down firmly in favor of the "demand-side" argument that maldistribution of income in the 1920s having left the bulk of potential consumers with too small a share of national income to buy all that mass production was putting on the market was the principal cause of the collapse. Building on his innovative use of letters written by "ordinary" Americans during the Depression that were collected in his first book, "Down and Out in the Great Depression", McElvaine takes readers into the experience of Depression victims to an extent never before achieved.
Perspectives on capitalism by school of thought
The Chicago School of economics is best known for its free market advocacy and monetarist ideas. According to Friedman and other monetarists, market economies are inherently stable if left to themselves and depressions result only from government intervention.
Friedman argued that the Great Depression was result of a contraction of the money supply controlled by the Federal Reserve and not by the lack of investment as John Maynard Keynes: "There is likely to be a lag between the need for action and government recognition of the need; a further lag between recognition of the need for action and the taking of action; and a still further lag between the action and its effects". Ben Bernanke, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is among the economists today generally accepting Friedman's analysis of the causes of the Great Depression.
Great Depression in France
The Great Depression affected France from about 1931 through the remainder of the decade. The crisis affected France a bit later than other countries, hitting around 1931. While the 1920s grew at the very strong rate of 4.43% per year, the 1930s rate fell to only 0.63%. The depression was relatively mild: unemployment peaked under 5%, the fall in production was at most 20% below the 1929 output; there was no banking crisis. The depression had some effects on the local economy, which can partly explain the 6 February 1934 crisis and even more the formation of the Popular Front, led by SFIO socialist leader Léon Blum, who won the election of 1936.
Great Depression
The world financial crisis began to overwhelm Britain in 1931; investors across the world started withdrawing their gold from London at the rate of £2.5 million per day. Credits of £25 millions each from the Bank of France and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and an issue of £15 millions fiduciary note slowed, but did not reverse the British crisis. The financial crisis now caused a major political crisis in Britain in August 1931. With deficits mounting, the bankers demanded a balanced budget; the divided cabinet of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government agreed; it proposed to raise taxes, cut spending and most controversially, to cut unemployment benefits by 20%. The attack on welfare was totally unacceptable to the Labour movement. MacDonald wanted to resign, but King George V insisted he remain and form an all-party coalition "National Government". The Conservative and Liberals parties signed on, along with a small cadre of Labour, but the vast majority of Labour leaders denounced MacDonald as a traitor for leading the new government. Britain went off the gold standard, and suffered relatively less than other major countries in the Great Depression. In the 1931 British election, the Labour Party was virtually destroyed, leaving MacDonald as Prime Minister for a largely Conservative coalition.
Great Depression in the United States
The usual explanations include numerous factors, especially high consumer debt, ill-regulated markets that permitted overoptimistic loans by banks and investors, and the lack of high-growth new industries. These all interacted to create a downward economic spiral of reduced spending, falling confidence and lowered production.
Industries that suffered the most included construction, shipping, mining, logging and agriculture (compounded by dust-bowl conditions in the heartland). Also hard hit was the manufacturing of durable goods like automobiles and appliances, whose purchase could be postponed. The economy hit bottom in the winter of 1932–33; then came four years of growth until the Recession of 1937 brought back high levels of unemployment.
Deflation
The deflation of the Great Depression occurred partly because there was an enormous contraction of credit (money), bankruptcies creating an environment where cash was in frantic demand, and when the Federal Reserve was supposed to accommodate that demand, it instead contracted the money supply by 30% in enforcement of its new real bills doctrine, so banks toppled one-by-one (because they were unable to meet the sudden demand for cash see fractional-reserve banking). From the standpoint of the Fisher equation (see above), there was a concomitant drop both in money supply (credit) and the velocity of money which was so profound that price deflation took hold despite the increases in money supply spurred by the Federal Reserve.
Causes of the Great Depression
The years 1929 to 1941 had the highest total factor productivity growth in the history of the U. S., largely due to the productivity increases in public utilities, transportation and trade.
Causes of the Great Depression
In a 1995 survey of American economic historians, two-thirds agreed that the Smoot-Hawley tariff act at least worsened the Great Depression. However, many economists believe that the Smoot-Hawley tariff act was not a major contributor to the great depression. Economist Paul Krugman holds that, "Where protectionism really mattered was in preventing a recovery in trade when production recovered". He cites a report by Barry Eichengreen and Douglas Irwin: Figure 1 in that report shows trade and production dropping together from 1929 to 1932, but production increasing faster than trade from 1932 to 1937. The authors argue that adherence to the gold standard forced many countries to resort to tariffs, when instead they should have devalued their currencies. Peter Temin argues that contrary the popular argument, the contractionary effect of the tariff was small. He notes that exports were 7 percent of GNP in 1929, they fell by 1.5 percent of 1929 GNP in the next two years and the fall was offset by the increase in domestic demand from tariff.
Causes of the Great Recession
According to M.S. Eccles, who was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve by FDR and held that position until 1948, excessive debt levels were not a source cause of the Great Depression. Increasing debt levels were caused by a concentration of wealth during the 1920s, causing the middle and poorer classes, which saw a relative and/or actual decrease in wealth, to go increasingly into debt in an attempt to maintain or improve their living standards. According to Eccles this concentration of wealth was the source cause of the Great Depression. The ever-increasing debt levels eventually became unpayable, and therefore unsustainable, leading to debt defaults and the financial panics of the 1930s. The concentration of wealth in the modern era parallels that of the 1920s and has had similar effects. Some of the causes of wealth concentration in the modern era are lower tax rates for the rich, such as Warren Buffett paying taxes at a lower rate than the people working for him, policies such as propping up the stock market, which benefit the stock owning rich more than the middle or poorer classes who own little or no stock, and bailouts which funnel tax money collected largely from the middle class to bail out large corporations largely owned by the rich.
Causes of the Great Recession
Many factors directly and indirectly caused the Great Recession (which started in 2007 with the US subprime mortgage crisis), with experts and economists placing different weights on particular causes.
Causes of the Great Depression
According to the gold standard theory of the Depression, the Depression was largely caused by the decision of most western nations after World War I to return to the gold standard at the pre-war gold price. Monetary policy, according to this view, was thereby put into a deflationary setting that would over the next decade slowly grind away at the health of many European economies.
Clarence Barber
Effects of the Great Depression in his youth motivated Barber to study economics . In 1978, Barber wrote ""On the Causes of the Great Depression"" where he made a link between demographics and economics. He cited how demand for housing in the U.S. began to drop beginning in 1926. Early in 1929, demand for housing dropped precipitously. The stock market crash in October of that same year was preceded by a decline in demand, Barber argues, that began with a lower formation of households concomitant with lower rates of marriage. After World War I, a birth dearth had resulted; a dearth that demographers have shown did not end until World War II ended. (see Causes of the Great Depression)
The death of young men as soldiers in World War I, coupled with the Flu Pandemic of 1918 wrought their eventual harm to the economy as a whole. The increase in secularization during the 'Roaring Twenties', as automobiles became widespread, and availability of electricity and electrical appliances and such, may have had its effect too. Barber showed in ""On Causes..."" that lower demand for mortgages and other loans preceded by some years a shortage of loan availability as the Great Depression deepened towards 1933.
History of conservatism in the United States
The Great Depression which followed the 1929 stock market collapse led to price deflation, massive unemployment, falling farm incomes, investment losses, bank failures, business bankruptcies and reduced government revenues. Herbert Hoover's protectionist economic policies failed to halt the depression, and in the 1932 presidential election, Democratic Franklin D. Roosevelt won a landslide victory.
Depression (economics)
A long-term effect of the Great Depression was the departure of every major currency from the gold standard, although the initial impetus for this was World War II (see Bretton Woods Accord). In any case, the world economy has simply outgrown the capacity of additions to the world gold supply to accommodate the increase in world population and increased trade without periodic, painful revaluations of any currencies tied to gold.
Causes of the Great Depression
Their land was already over-mortgaged (as a result of the 1919 bubble in land prices), and crop prices were too low to allow them to pay off what they owed. Small banks, especially those tied to the agricultural economy, were in constant crisis in the 1920s with their customers defaulting on loans because of the sudden rise in real interest rates; there was a steady stream of failures among these smaller banks throughout the decade.
Great Depression
Irving Fisher argued that the predominant factor leading to the Great Depression was a vicious circle of deflation and growing over-indebtedness. He outlined nine factors interacting with one another under conditions of debt and deflation to create the mechanics of boom to bust. The chain of events proceeded as follows:
History of the United States (1918–1945)
Historians and economists still have not agreed on the causes of the Great Depression, but there is general agreement that it began in the United States in late 1929 and was either started or worsened by "Black Thursday," the stock market crash of Thursday, October 24, 1929. Sectors of the US economy had been showing some signs of distress for months before October 1929. Business inventories of all types were three times as large as they had been a year before (an indication that the public was not buying products as rapidly as in the past), and other signposts of economic health—-freight carloads, industrial production, and wholesale prices—-were slipping downward.
Great Depression
According to this view, the root cause of the Great Depression was a global over-investment in heavy industry capacity compared to wages and earnings from independent businesses, such as farms. The proposed solution was for the government to pump money into the consumers' pockets. That is, it must redistribute purchasing power, maintaining the industrial base, and re-inflating prices and wages to force as much of the inflationary increase in purchasing power into consumer spending. The economy was overbuilt, and new factories were not needed. Foster and Catchings recommended federal and state governments to start large construction projects, a program followed by Hoover and Roosevelt.
Causes of the Great Depression
Friedrich Hayek had criticised the FED and the Bank of England in the 1930s for not taking a more contractionary stance. However, in 1975, Hayek admitted that he made a mistake in the 1930s in not opposing the Central Bank's deflationary policy and stated the reason why he had been ambivalent: "At that time I believed that a process of deflation of some short duration might break the rigidity of wages which I thought was incompatible with a functioning economy. In 1978, he made it clear that he agreed with the point of view of the Monetarists, saying, "I agree with Milton Friedman that once the Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy", and that he was as opposed to deflation as he was to inflation. Concordantly, economist Lawrence White argues that the business cycle theory of Hayek is inconsistent with a monetary policy which permits a severe contraction of the money supply.
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.
Causes of the Great Depression
Despite liquidationist expectations, a large proportion of the capital stock was not redeployed and vanished during the first years of the Great Depression. According to a study by Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers, the recession caused a drop of net capital accumulation to pre-1924 levels by 1933.
Economic collapse
As bad as the Great Depression was, it took place during a period of high productivity growth, which caused real wages to rise. The high unemployment was partly a result of the productivity gains, allowing the number of hours of the standard work week to be cut while restoring economic output to previous levels after a few years. Workers who remained employed saw their real hourly earnings rise because wages remained constant while prices fell; however, overall earnings remained relatively constant because of the reduced work week. Converting the dollar to a fiat currency and devaluing against gold ensured the end of deflation and created inflation, which made the high debt accumulated during the 1920s boom easier to repay, although some of the debt was written off.
Causes of the Great Depression
Barber says, while there is "no clear evidence" of a decline in "the rate of growth of productivity" during the 1920s, there is "clear evidence" the population growth rate began to decline during that same period. He argues the decline in population growth rate may have caused a decline in "the natural rate of growth" which was significant enough to cause a serious depression.
Causes of the Great Depression
Among the causes of the decline in the population growth rate during the 1920s were a declining birth rate after 1910 and reduced immigration. The decline in immigration was largely the result of legislation in the 1920s placing greater restrictions on immigration. In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924.
Causes of the Great Depression
Before the "Keynesian Revolution", such a liquidationist theory was a common position for economists to take and was held and advanced by economists like Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins Joseph Schumpeter, Seymour Harris and others. According to the liquidationists a depression is good medicine. The function of a depression is to liquidate failed investments and businesses that have been made obsolete by technological development in order to release factors of production (capital and labor) from unproductive uses. These can then be redeployed in other sectors of the technologically dynamic economy. They asserted that deflationary policy minimized the duration of the Depression of 1920–21 by tolerating liquidation which subsequently created economic growth later in the decade. They pushed for deflationary policies (which were already executed in 1921) which – in their opinion – would assist the release of capital and labor from unproductive activities to lay the groundwork for a new economic boom. The liquidationists argued that even if self-adjustment of the economy took mass bankruptcies, then so be it. Postponing the liquidation process would only magnify the social costs. Schumpeter wrote that it
Depression (economics)
The best-known depression was the Great Depression, which affected most national economies in the world throughout the 1930s. This depression is generally considered to have begun with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and the crisis quickly spread to other national economies. Between 1929 and 1933, the gross national product of the United States decreased by 33% while the rate of unemployment increased to 25% (with industrial unemployment alone rising to approximately 35% – U.S. employment was still over 25% agricultural).
Causes of the Great Depression
In 1939, prominent economist Alvin Hansen discussed the decline in population growth in relation to the Depression.
The same idea was discussed in a 1978 journal article by Clarence Barber, an economist at the University of Manitoba. Using "a form of the Harrod model" to analyze the Depression, Barber states:
Stimulus (economics)
Milton Friedman argued that the Great Depression was caused by the fact that the Federal Reserve did not counteract the sudden reduction of money stock and velocity. Ben Bernanke argued, instead, that the problem was lack of credit, not lack of money, and hence, during the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve led by Bernanke provided additional credit, not additional liquidity (money), to stimulate the economy back on trail. Jeff Hummel has analyzed the different implications of these two conflicting explanations. President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Jeffrey Lacker, with Renee Haltom, has criticized Bernanke's solution because "it encourages excessive risk-taking and contributes to financial instability."
Charles P. Kindleberger
His 1973 and 1986 book "The World in Depression 1929–1939" (University of California Press, 1986 [Revised and Enlarged Edition]) advances an idiosyncratic, internationalist view of the causes and nature of the Great Depression. Blaming the peculiar length and depth of the Depression on the hesitancy of the US in taking over leadership of the world economy when Britain was no longer up to the role after World War I, he concludes that "for the world economy to be stabilized, there has to be a stabilizer—one stabilizer", by which, in the context of the interwar years at least, he means the United States. In the last chapter "An Explanation of the 1929 Depression", Kindleberger lists the five responsibilities the US would have had to assume in order to stabilize the world economy:Kindleberger was highly skeptical of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's monetarist view of the causes of the Depression, seeing it as too narrow and perhaps dogmatic, and dismisses out of hand what he characterized as Paul Samuelson's "accidental" or "fortuitous" interpretation. "The World in Depression" was praised by John Kenneth Galbraith as 'the best book on the subject'.
Notes
Interwar period
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place after 1929. The timing varied across nations; in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. The depression originated in the United States and became worldwide news with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (known as Black Tuesday). Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide GDP fell by an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. However, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II.
Great Depression
The two classical competing theories of the Great Depression are the Keynesian (demand-driven) and the monetarist explanation. There are also various heterodox theories that downplay or reject the explanations of the Keynesians and monetarists. The consensus among demand-driven theories is that a large-scale loss of confidence led to a sudden reduction in consumption and investment spending. Once panic and deflation set in, many people believed they could avoid further losses by keeping clear of the markets. Holding money became profitable as prices dropped lower and a given amount of money bought ever more goods, exacerbating the drop in demand. Monetarists believe that the Great Depression started as an ordinary recession, but the shrinking of the money supply greatly exacerbated the economic situation, causing a recession to descend into the Great Depression.
Economic history of the United States
Following the stock market crash, the worldwide economy plunged into the Great Depression. The U.S. money supply began to contract by one-third. The protectionist Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act incited retaliation by Canada, Britain, Germany and other trading partners. Congress, in 1932, worried about the rapidly growing deficit and national debt, and raised income tax rates. Economists generally agree that these measures deepened an already serious crisis. By 1932, the unemployment rate was 25%. Conditions were worse in heavy industry, lumbering, export agriculture (cotton, wheat, tobacco), and mining. Conditions were not quite as bad in white collar sectors and in light manufacturing.
Causes of the Great Depression
Economists such as Waddill Catchings, William Trufant Foster, Rexford Tugwell, Adolph Berle (and later John Kenneth Galbraith), popularized a theory that had some influence on Franklin D. Roosevelt. This theory held that the economy produced more goods than consumers could purchase, because the consumers did not have enough income. According to this view, in the 1920s wages had increased at a lower rate than productivity growth, which had been high. Most of the benefit of the increased productivity went into profits, which went into the stock market bubble rather than into consumer purchases. Thus workers did not have enough income to absorb the large amount of capacity that had been added.
Causes of the Great Depression
In his book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (1936), British economist John Maynard Keynes introduced concepts that were intended to help explain the Great Depression. He argued that there are reasons why the self-correcting mechanisms that many economists claimed should work during a downturn might not work.
Causes of the Great Depression
The stock market crash was not the first sign of the Great Depression. "Long before the crash, community banks were failing at the rate of one per day". It was the development of the Federal Reserve System that misled investors in the 1920s into relying on federal banks as a safety net. They were encouraged to continue buying stocks and to overlook any of the fluctuations. Economist Roger Babson tried to warn the investors of the deficiency to come, but was ridiculed even as the economy began to deteriorate during the summer of 1929. While England and Germany struggled under the strain on gold currencies after the war, economists were blinded by an unsustainable 'new economy' they sought to be considerably stable and successful.
Timeline of the Great Depression
A true understanding of the Great Depression requires not only knowledge of the U.S. monetary system but also the implications of the gold standard on its participatory nations. The gold standard made the involved nations interdependent on each other's policies. Due to a fixed exchange rate, the only way to affect the demand for gold was through interest rates. For example, if interest rates were high in one country, then investors would have no reason to exchange currency for gold and the gold reserves would remain stable. However, if interest rates were low in a different country then its investors would elect to move their funds abroad where interest rates were higher. In order to stop this from happening, each nation within the gold standard union had no choice but to raise its interest rates in correspondence with its fellow nation. This interconnectivity of deflationary policy amongst so many nations resulted in the prolongation of the greatest economic downturn.
New Deal
Lowell E. Gallaway and Richard K. Vedder argue on the basis of Austrian School of economics theories that the Great Depression was caused by wages being too high which they say had caused a loss of depositor confidence which caused the bank runs. They further conclude that the "Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its duration and its magnitude by the impact of New Deal programs". They suggest that without Social Security, work relief, unemployment insurance, mandatory minimum wages and without special government-granted privileges for labor unions, business would have hired more workers and the unemployment rate during the New Deal years would have been 6.7% instead of 17.2%. Amity Shlaes wrote that "from 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great". Shlaes said that the NRA was misguided because it used price setting to fix monetary problems. According to Shlaes, Roosevelt's experimentation frightened business into inaction and prevented recovery. Eric Rauchway showed that Shlaes tried to diminish the economic growth by referring to the unrepresentative Dow Jones Industrial Average. He continued that usually a historian or economist would have referred to the gross domestic product, which according to the Historical Statistics of the United States grew impressively by 9% annually during Roosevelt's first term and by 11% annually after the short recession of 1937–1938.
Causes of the Great Depression
Austrian economists argue that the Great Depression was the inevitable outcome of the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve during the 1920s. In their opinion, the central bank's policy was an "easy credit policy" which led to an unsustainable credit-driven boom. In the Austrian view, the inflation of the money supply during this period led to an unsustainable boom in both asset prices (stocks and bonds) and capital goods. By the time the Federal Reserve belatedly tightened monetary policy in 1928, it was too late to avoid a significant economic contraction. Austrians argue that government intervention after the crash of 1929 delayed the market's adjustment and made the road to complete recovery more difficult.
Great Depression in the United Kingdom
The Great Depression in the United Kingdom, also known as the Great Slump, was a period of national economic downturn in the 1930s, which had its origins in the global Great Depression. It was Britain's largest and most profound economic depression of the 20th century. The Great Depression originated in the United States in late 1929 and quickly spread to the world. Britain had never experienced the boom that had characterized the U.S., Germany, Canada and Australia in the 1920s, so its effect appeared less severe. Britain's world trade fell by half (1929–33), the output of heavy industry fell by a third, employment profits plunged in nearly all sectors. At the depth in summer 1932, registered unemployed numbered 3.5 million, and many more had only part-time employment.
Causes of the Great Depression
From the point of view of today's mainstream schools of economic thought, government should strive to keep some broad nominal aggregate on a stable growth path (for proponents of new classical macroeconomics and monetarism, the measure is the nominal money supply; for Keynesian economists it is the nominal aggregate demand itself). During a depression the central bank should pour liquidity into the banking system and the government should cut taxes and accelerate spending in order to keep the nominal money stock and total nominal demand from collapsing.
Paul Samuelson
Samuelson wrote: "It is not too much to say that the widespread creation of dictatorships and the resulting World War II stemmed in no small measure from the world's failure to meet this basic economic problem [the Great Depression] adequately." This reflected the concern of Keynes himself with the economic causes of war and the importance of economic policy in promoting peace.
History of economic thought
During the Great Depression, Keynes published his most important work, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (1936). The Great Depression had been sparked by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, leading to massive rises in unemployment in the United States, leading to debts being recalled from European borrowers, and an economic domino effect across the world. Orthodox economics called for a tightening of spending, until business confidence and profit levels could be restored. Keynes by contrast, had argued in "A Tract on Monetary Reform" (1923) (which argues for a stable currency) that a variety of factors determined economic activity, and that it was not enough to wait for the long run market equilibrium to restore itself. As Keynes famously remarked:
Great Depression
The causes of the Great Recession seem similar to the Great Depression, but significant differences exist. The previous chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, had extensively studied the Great Depression as part of his doctoral work at MIT, and implemented policies to manipulate the money supply and interest rates in ways that were not done in the 1930s. Generally speaking, the recovery of the world's financial systems tended to be quicker during the Great Depression of the 1930s as opposed to the late-2000s recession.
The Commanding Heights
The Great Depression caused massive unemployment and with it massive public distrust of corporations and wealthy individuals. In response, the New Deal instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt went into effect with massive public support. Many lawyers and economists influenced by Keynes worked under the New Deal and believed that free markets would lead to disaster without proper regulation.
Causes of the Great Recession
Major causes of the initial subprime mortgage crisis and following recession include: International trade imbalances and lax lending standards contributing to high levels of developed country household debt and real-estate bubbles that have since burst; U.S. government housing policies; and limited regulation of non-depository financial institutions. Once the recession began, various responses were attempted with different degrees of success. These included fiscal policies of governments; monetary policies of central banks; measures designed to help indebted consumers refinance their mortgage debt; and inconsistent approaches used by nations to bail out troubled banking industries and private bondholders, assuming private debt burdens or socializing losses.
Causes of the Great Depression
Uncertainty was a major factor, argued by several economists, that contributed to the worsening and length of the depression. It was also said to be responsible "for the initial decline in consumption that marks the" beginning of the Great Depression by economists Paul R. Flacco and Randall E. Parker. Economist Ludwig Lachmann argues that it was pessimism that prevented the recovery and worsening of the depression President Hoover is said to have been blinded from what was right in front of him.
Depression (economics)
The savings & loans and the leveraged buyout crises led to a severe depression in mid-to-late 1989, causing a recession in 1990-91 (also fueled by the oil price crisis), whose effects lasted as late as 1994. This downturn is more remembered for its political effects: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had to resign in November 1990 as a result of the socioeconomic debacle caused by her later policies; and while his approval ratings were above 60%, U.S. President George H. W. Bush lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton because of the domestic malady marked by the depression and increasing urban decay.
Benjamin Strong Jr.
Economic historian Charles P. Kindleberger states that Strong was one of the few U.S. policymakers interested in the troubled financial affairs of Europe in the 1920s, and that had he not died in 1928, just a year before the Great Depression, he might have been able to maintain stability in the international financial system; although economist Murray Rothbard claimed that it was Strong's manipulations that caused the Depression in the first place. Author Bill Bryson specifically recounts that Strong's insistence on cutting the Fed's discount rate a half percent in 1927, made Herbert Hoover furious, fueled the market bubble of 1928, and led to the disastrous market collapse in 1929.
League for Social Reconstruction
The Canadian economy had boomed during the late 1920s and showed no sign of weakness, but during the 1930s the Great Depression swept across Canada and provoked mass unemployment, and this incited the LSR into action. The LSR believed that the roots of the Depression were laissez-faire capitalism and governance, and that the "free" market was anything but. Politicians worked closely with business, securing interest-free loans, developing tariffs, and managing labour disputes; in short: manipulating markets. A small group of political businessmen controlled public policy and economic development, and guided the centralization of finance and power into private hands. Widespread unemployment marked the Depression, and served to underscore financial inequity. In the eyes of the LSR, the problem facing Canada was not an economic depression, it was a corrupt political economy.
Causes of the Great Depression
Keynes argued that if the national government spent more money to help the economy to recover the money normally spent by consumers and business firms, then unemployment rates would fall. The solution was for the Federal Reserve System to "create new money for the national government to borrow and spend" and to cut taxes rather than raising them, in order for consumers to spend more, and other beneficial factors. Hoover chose to do the opposite of what Keynes thought to be the solution and allowed the federal government to raise taxes exceedingly to reduce the budget shortage brought upon by the depression. Keynes proclaimed that more workers could be employed by decreasing interest rates, encouraging firms to borrow more money and make more products. Employment would prevent the government from having to spend any more money by increasing the amount at which consumers would spend. Keynes' theory was then confirmed by the length of the Great Depression within the United States and the constant unemployment rate. Employment rates began to rise in preparation for World War II by increasing government spending. "In light of these developments, the Keynesian explanation of the Great Depression was increasingly accepted by economists, historians, and politicians".
Causes of the Great Depression
In some cases, deflation can be hard on sectors of the economy such as agriculture, if they are deeply in debt at high interest rates and are unable to refinance, or that are dependent upon loans to finance capital goods when low interest rates are not available. Deflation erodes the price of commodities while increasing the real liability of debt. Deflation is beneficial to those with assets in cash, and to those who wish to invest or purchase assets or loan money.
Causes of the Great Depression
J. Bradford DeLong explained that Hoover would have been a budget cutter in normal times and continuously wanted to balance the budget. Hoover held the line against powerful political forces that sought to increase government spending after the Depression began for fully two and a half years. During the first two years of the Depression (1929 and 1930) Hoover actually achieved budget surpluses of about 0.8% of gross domestic product (GDP). In 1931, when the recession significantly worsened and GDP declined by 15%, the federal budget had only a small deficit of 0.6% of GDP. It was not until 1932 (when GDP declined by 27% compared to 1929-level) that Hoover pushed for measures (Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Federal Home Loan Bank Act, direct loans to fund state Depression relief programs) that increased spending. But at the same time he pushed for the Revenue Act of 1932 that massively increased taxes in order to balance the budget again.
Great Depression in the United States
The Great Depression began in the United States of America and quickly spread worldwide. It had severe effects in countries both rich and poor. Personal income, consumption, industrial output, tax revenue, profits and prices dropped, while international trade plunged by more than 50%. Unemployment in the U.S. rose to 25%, and in some countries rose as high as 33%.
Financial crisis
Negative GDP growth lasting two or more quarters is called a "recession". An especially prolonged or severe recession may be called a "depression", while a long period of slow but not necessarily negative growth is sometimes called economic stagnation.
Some economists argue that many recessions have been caused in large part by financial crises. One important example is the Great Depression, which was preceded in many countries by bank runs and stock market crashes. The subprime mortgage crisis and the bursting of other real estate bubbles around the world also led to recession in the U.S. and a number of other countries in late 2008 and 2009.
Great Depression in the United States
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 is often cited as the beginning of the Great Depression. It began on October 24, 1929, and was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States. Much of the stock market crash can be attributed to exuberance and false expectations. In the years leading up to 1929, the rising stock market prices had created vast sums of wealth for those invested, in turn encouraging borrowing to further buy more stock. However, on October 24 (Black Thursday), share prices began to fall and panic selling caused prices to fall sharply. On October 29 (Black Tuesday), share prices fell by $14 billion in a single day, more than $30 billion in the week. The value that evaporated that week was 10x more than the entire federal budget and more than all of what the U.S. spent on World War I. By 1930 the value of shares had fallen by 90%.
Causes of the Great Depression
According to Peter Temin, Barry Wigmore, Gauti B. Eggertsson and Christina Romer the biggest primary impact of the New Deal on the economy and the key to recovery and to end the Great Depression was brought about by a successful management of public expectations. Before the first New Deal measures people expected a contractionary economic situation (recession, deflation) to persist. Roosevelt's fiscal and monetary policy regime change helped to make his policy objectives credible. Expectations changed towards an expansionary development (economic growth, inflation). The expectation of higher future income and higher future inflation stimulated demand and investments. The analysis suggests that the elimination of the policy dogmas of the gold standard, balanced budget and small government led to a large shift in expectation that accounts for about 70–80 percent of the recovery of output and prices from 1933 to 1937. If the regime change would not have happened and the Hoover policy would have continued, the economy would have continued its free fall in 1933, and output would have been 30 percent lower in 1937 than in 1933.
Causes of the Great Depression
The majority of historians and economists argue the New Deal was beneficial to recovery. In a survey of economic historians conducted by Robert Whaples, Professor of Economics at Wake Forest University, anonymous questionnaires were sent to members of the "Economic History Association". Members were asked to either "disagree", "agree", or "agree with provisos" with the statement that read: "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." While only 6% of economic historians who worked in the history department of their universities agreed with the statement, 27% of those that work in the economics department agreed. Almost an identical percent of the two groups (21% and 22%) agreed with the statement "with provisos", while 74% of those who worked in the history department, and 51% in the economics department, disagreed with the statement outright.
Causes of the Great Depression
Bank failures snowballed as desperate bankers called in loans, which the borrowers did not have time or money to repay. With future profits looking poor, capital investment and construction slowed or completely ceased. In the face of bad loans and worsening future prospects, the surviving banks became even more conservative in their lending. Banks built up their capital reserves and made fewer loans, which intensified deflationary pressures. A vicious cycle developed and the downward spiral accelerated.
Joseph Stiglitz
Contrary to most economists historians, who argue that tariffs have played only a minor role or not at all in the Great Depression, Stiglitz thinks that the United States should not protect its economy because tariffs contributed to the Great Depression: "Following that, U.S. exports fell by some 50 percent—contributing to our Great Depression".
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place mostly during the 1930s, beginning in the United States. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations; in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late-1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how intensely the world's economy can decline.
Ben Bernanke
Bernanke is particularly interested in the economic and political causes of the Great Depression, on which he has published numerous academic journal articles. Before Bernanke's work, the dominant monetarist theory of the Great Depression was Milton Friedman's view that it had been largely caused by the Federal Reserve's having reduced the money supply and has on several occasions argued that one of the biggest mistakes made during the period was to raise interest rates too early. In a speech on Milton Friedman's ninetieth birthday (November 8, 2002), Bernanke said:
"Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna [Schwartz, Friedman's coauthor]: Regarding the Great Depression, you're right. We did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."
Great Depression
Economists and economic historians are almost evenly split as to whether the traditional monetary explanation that monetary forces were the primary cause of the Great Depression is right, or the traditional Keynesian explanation that a fall in autonomous spending, particularly investment, is the primary explanation for the onset of the Great Depression. Today the controversy is of lesser importance since there is mainstream support for the debt deflation theory and the expectations hypothesis that building on the monetary explanation of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz add non-monetary explanations.
Comparisons between the Great Recession and the Great Depression
Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman predicted a series of depressions in his "The Return of Depression Economics" (1999), based on "failures on the demand side of the economy." On January 5, 2009, he wrote that "preventing depressions isn't that easy after all" and that "the economy is still in free fall." In March 2009, Krugman explained that a major difference in this situation is that the causes of this financial crisis were from the shadow banking system. "The crisis hasn't involved problems with deregulated institutions that took new risks... Instead, it involved risks taken by institutions that were never regulated in the first place."
Causes of the Great Depression
There is consensus that the Federal Reserve System should have cut short the process of monetary deflation and banking collapse. If the Fed had done that, the economic downturn would have been far less severe and much shorter.
African-American socialism
The Great Depression of the 1930s began after the stock market crash in 1929. However, it hit the Black population much harder than Whites. Black people were forced out of their already unskilled jobs. This caused them to face an unemployment rate of more that 50 percent, compared to their counterparts of about 30 percent. Black workers were already being paid 30 percent below the white workers. Black people gained no relief of their trials from the Roosevelt administration because the National Recovery Act (NRA) was later referred to, by African-Americans, as the Negro Removal Act. NRA public works rarely hired Blacks during this time, even though the stated goal was to not discriminate while hiring. Although the American Federation of Labor president, William Green, did acknowledge civil rights and asserted to oppose Jim Crow locations, there was nothing enforcing the affiliated unions to follow these allegations. Because many Black laborers were without support, they formed unions of their own, like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Because these men sought their own support, they were often lynched in both the North and the South. This situation was soon turned around in 1934 during a strike wave. Labor strikes spread all over the country from Toledo to Minneapolis to San Francisco. These events consisted of an organization among the unskilled and mass production workers, whom all were not Black. As expected during this time, racism was the center of the industrial unionism. This is a labor union organizing method in which all workers of the same industry are organized into the same union. For instance, workers in the plant industry were placed into the same labor union, nationwide, regardless of an individual's particular job. Blacks, in the most dangerous, dirty and low-paid jobs, were in the same union as better-paid Whites. Because of these racial injustices, African-Americans remained in the lowest ends of poverty, without legal support, throughout the years of the Great Depression.
New Deal
At the beginning of the Great Depression, the economy was destabilized by bank failures followed by credit crunches. The initial reasons were substantial losses in investment banking, followed by bank runs. Bank runs occurred when a large number of customers withdrew their deposits because they believed the bank might become insolvent. As the bank run progressed, it generated a self-fulfilling prophecy: as more people withdrew their deposits, the likelihood of default increased and this encouraged further withdrawals.
Causes of the Great Depression
Economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman suggested that the do-nothing policy prescription which resulted from the liquidationist theory contributed to deepening the Great Depression. With the rhetoric of ridicule Keynes tried to discredit the liquidationist view in presenting Hayek, Robbins and Schumpeter as
Causes of the Great Depression
The United States government and the Federal Reserve did not do that during the 1929‑32 slide into the Great Depression The existence of "liquidationism" played a key part in motivating public policy decisions not to fight the gathering Great Depression. An increasingly common view among economic historians is that the adherence of some Federal Reserve policymakers to the liquidationist thesis led to disastrous consequences. Regarding the policies of President Hoover, economists Barry Eichengreen and J. Bradford DeLong point out that the Hoover administration's fiscal policy was guided by liquidationist economists and policy makers, as Hoover tried to keep the federal budget balanced until 1932, when Hoover lost confidence in his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon and replaced him. Hoover wrote in his memoirs he did not side with the liquidationists, but took the side of those in his cabinet with "economic responsibility", his Secretary of Commerce Robert P. Lamont and Secretary of Agriculture Arthur M. Hyde, who advised the President to "use the powers of government to cushion the situation". But at the same time he kept Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury until February 1932. It was during 1932 that Hoover began to support more aggressive measures to combat the Depression. In his memoirs, President Hoover wrote bitterly about members of his Cabinet who had advised inaction during the downslide into the Great Depression:
Causes of the Great Recession
Excessive consumer housing debt was in turn caused by the mortgage-backed security, credit default swap, and collateralized debt obligation sub-sectors of the finance industry, which were offering irrationally low interest rates and irrationally high levels of approval to subprime mortgage consumers because they were calculating aggregate risk using gaussian copula formulas that strictly assumed the independence of individual component mortgages, when in fact the credit-worthiness almost every new subprime mortgage was highly correlated with that of any other because of linkages through consumer spending levels which fell sharply when property values began to fall during the initial wave of mortgage defaults. Debt consumers were acting in their rational self-interest, because they were unable to audit the finance industry's opaque faulty risk pricing methodology.
Causes of the Great Depression
More recent research, by economists such as Temin, Ben Bernanke, and Barry Eichengreen, has focused on the constraints policy makers were under at the time of the Depression. In this view, the constraints of the inter-war gold standard magnified the initial economic shock and were a significant obstacle to any actions that would ameliorate the growing Depression. According to them, the initial destabilizing shock may have originated with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 in the U.S., but it was the gold standard system that transmitted the problem to the rest of the world.
Long Depression
In the US the speculative nature of financing due to both the greenback, which was paper currency issued to pay for the Civil War and rampant fraud in the building of the Union Pacific Railway up to 1869 culminated in the Credit Mobilier panic. Railway overbuilding and weak markets collapsed the bubble in 1873. Both the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific lines were central to the collapse; another railway bubble was the railway mania in the United Kingdom.
Causes of the Great Depression
The two classical competing theories of the Great Depression are the Keynesian (demand-driven) and the monetarist explanation. There are also various heterodox theories that downplay or reject the explanations of the Keynesians and monetarists.
Causes of the Great Depression
The idea that reduced capital investment was a cause of the depression is a central theme in secular stagnation theory.
Great Depression
There is no consensus among economists regarding the motive force for the U.S. economic expansion that continued through most of the Roosevelt years (and the 1937 recession that interrupted it). The common view among most economists is that Roosevelt's New Deal policies either caused or accelerated the recovery, although his policies were never aggressive enough to bring the economy completely out of recession. Some economists have also called attention to the positive effects from expectations of reflation and rising nominal interest rates that Roosevelt's words and actions portended. It was the rollback of those same reflationary policies that led to the interruption of a recession beginning in late 1937. One contributing policy that reversed reflation was the Banking Act of 1935, which effectively raised reserve requirements, causing a monetary contraction that helped to thwart the recovery. GDP returned to its upward trend in 1938.
Milton Friedman
Friedman rejected the use of fiscal policy as a tool of demand management; and he held that the government's role in the guidance of the economy should be restricted severely. Friedman wrote extensively on the Great Depression, and he termed the 1929–1933 period the Great Contraction. He argued that the Depression had been caused by an ordinary financial shock whose duration and seriousness were greatly increased by the subsequent contraction of the money supply caused by the misguided policies of the directors of the Federal Reserve.
Causes of the Great Depression
Beginning late in the 1920s, European demand for U.S. goods began to decline. That was partly because European industry and agriculture were becoming more productive, and partly because some European nations (most notably Weimar Germany) were suffering serious financial crises and could not afford to buy goods overseas. However, the central issue causing the destabilization of the European economy in the late 1920s was the international debt structure that had emerged in the aftermath of World War I.
Causes of the Great Depression
Economist James Deusenberry argues economic imbalance was not only a result of World War I, but also of the structural changes made during the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. He also states the branches of the nation's economy became smaller, there was not much demand for housing, and the stock market crash "had a more direct impact on consumption than any previous financial panic"
Causes of the Great Depression
In the Cole-Ohanian model there is a slower than normal recovery which they explain by New Deal policies which they evaluated as tending towards monopoly and distribution of wealth. The key economic paper looking at these diagnostic sources in relation to the Great Depression is Cole and Ohanian's work. Cole-Ohanian point at two policies of New Deal: the National Industrial Recovery Act and National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the latter strengthening NIRA's labor provision. According to Cole-Ohanian New Deal policies created cartelization, high wages, and high prices in at least manufacturing and some energy and mining industries. Roosevelts policies against the severity of the Depression like the NIRA, a "code of fair competition" for each industry were aimed to reduce cutthroat competition in a period of severe deflation, which was seen as the cause for lowered demand and employment. The NIRA suspended antitrust laws and permitted collusion in some sectors provided that industry raised wages above clearing level and accepted collective bargaining with labor unions. The effects of cartelization can be seen as the basic effect of monopoly. The given corporation produces too little, charges too high of a price, and under-employs labor. Likewise, an increase in the power of unions creates a situation similar to monopoly. Wages are too high for the union members, so the corporation employs fewer people and, produces less output. Cole-Ohanian show that 60% of the difference between the trend and realized output is due to cartelization and unions. Chari, Kehoe, McGrattan also present a nice exposition that's in line with Cole-Ohanian. .
Huey Long
Long was a staunch opponent of the Federal Reserve System. Together with a group of House members and senators, Long claimed that the Federal Reserve's policies were the true cause of the Great Depression. Long made speeches denouncing the large banking houses of Morgan and Rockefeller centered in New York City, which owned stock in the Federal Reserve. He believed that these large bankers manipulated the monetary system to their own benefit, instead of that of the general public.
Economy of North America
The Great Depression began in North America in October 1929. The start is often dated to the stock market collapse of Black Tuesday although this was not the cause of the Great Depression. Canada and the United States experienced especially large declines, with the gross domestic product falling 37% from 1929 to 1933 in the United States, and 43% in Canada over the same period. The economy reached its lowest point in 1933, however recovery was slow. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 created demand for war materials that brought about the end of the depression.
Causes of the Great Depression
The idea of owning government bonds initially became ideal to investors when Liberty Loan drives encouraged this possession in America during World War I. This strive for dominion persisted into the 1920s. After World War I, the United States became the world's creditor and was depended upon by many foreign nations. "Governments from around the globe looked to Wall Street for loans". Investors then started to depend on these loans for further investments. Chief counsel of the Senate Bank Committee, Ferdinand Pecora, disclosed that National City executives were also dependent on loans from a special bank fund as a safety net for their stock losses while American banker, Albert Wiggin, "made millions selling short his own bank shares".
Great Depression in the United States
A large contribution to the recession was the closure and suspension of thousands of banks across the country. Financial institutions failed for several reasons, including unregulated lending procedures, confidence in the Gold standard, consumer confidence in future economics, and agricultural defaults on outstanding loans. With these compounding issues the banking system struggled to keep up with the public's increasing demand for cash withdrawals. This overall decreased the money supply and forced the banks to result to short sale (real estate) and liquidation of existing loans. In the race to liquidate assets the banking system began to fail on a wide scale. In November 1930 the first major banking crisis began with over 800 banks closing their doors by January 1931. By October 1931 over 2100 banks were suspended with the highest suspension rate recorded in the St. Louis Federal Reserve District, with 2 out of every 5 banks suspended. The economy as a whole experienced a massive reduction in banking footholds across the country amounting to more than nine thousand closed banks by 1933. 
The closures resulted in a massive withdrawal of deposits by millions of Americans estimated at near $6.8 billion (equivalent to around $60 billion in today's dollars). During this time the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was not in place resulting in a loss of roughly $1.36 billion (or 20%) of the total $6.8 billion accounted for within the failed banks. These losses came directly from everyday individuals' savings, investments and bank accounts. As a result, GDP fell from the high seven-hundreds in 1929 to the low to mid six-hundreds in 1933 before seeing any recovery for the first time in nearly 4 years. Federal leadership intervention is highly debated on its effectiveness and overall participation. The Federal Reserve Act could not effectively tackle the banking crisis as state bank and trust companies were not compelled to be a member, paper eligible discount member banks heavily restricted access to the Federal Reserve, power between the twelve Federal Reserve banks was decentralized and federal level leadership was ineffective, inexperienced, and weak.
History of the United States
During the 1920s, the nation enjoyed widespread prosperity, albeit with a weakness in agriculture. A financial bubble was fueled by an inflated stock market, which later led to the Stock Market Crash on October 29, 1929. This, along with many other economic factors, triggered a worldwide depression known as the Great Depression. During this time, the United States experienced deflation as prices fell, unemployment soared from 3% in 1929 to 25% in 1933, farm prices fell by half, and manufacturing output plunged by one-third.
Great Railroad Strike of 1877
The Long Depression, beginning in the United States with the financial Panic of 1873 and lasting 65 months, became the longest economic contraction in American history, including the later more famous, 45-month-long Great Depression of the 1930s. The failure of the Jay Cooke bank in New York, was followed quickly by that of Henry Clews, and set off a chain reaction of bank failures, temporarily closing the New York stock market.
Great Depression in the United States
Whether this caused the Great Depression is still heavily debated due to many other attributing factors. However, it is evident that the banking system suffered massive reductions across the country due to the lack of consumer confidence. As withdraw requests would exceed cash availability banks began conducting steed discount sales such as fire sales and short sales. Due to the inability to immediately determine current value worth these fire sales and short sales would result in massive losses when recuperating any possible revenue for outstanding and defaulted loans. This would allow healthy banks to take advantage of the struggling units forcing additional losses resulting in banks not being able to deliver on depositor demands and creating a failing cycle that would become wide spread. Investment would continue to stay low through the next half decade as the private sector would horde savings due to uncertainty of the future. The federal government would run additional policy changes such as the Check tax, monetary restrictions (including reduction of money supply by burning), High Wage Policy, and The New Deal through the Hoover and Roosevelt administration.
Causes of the Great Depression
According to this view, the root cause of the Great Depression was a global overinvestment while the level of wages and earnings from independent businesses fell short of creating enough purchasing power. It was argued that government should intervene by an increased taxation of the rich to help make income more equal. With the increased revenue the government could create public works to increase employment and 'kick start' the economy. In the USA the economic policies had been quite the opposite until 1932. The Revenue Act of 1932 and public works programmes introduced in Hoover's last year as president and taken up by Roosevelt, created some redistribution of purchasing power.
Causes of the Great Depression
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was instituted by Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley, and signed into law by President Hoover, to raise taxes on American imports by about 20 percent during June 1930. This tax, which added to already shrinking income and overproduction in the U.S., only benefitted Americans in having to spend less on foreign goods. In contrast, European trading nations frowned upon this tax increase, particularly since the "United States was an international creditor and exports to the U.S. market were already declining". In response to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, some of America's primary producers and largest trading partner, Canada, chose to seek retribution by increasing the financial value of imported goods favoured by the Americans.
Causes of the Great Recession
In a June 2008 speech, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then President and CEO of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, placed significant blame for the freezing of credit markets on a "run" on the entities in the "parallel" banking system, also called the shadow banking system. These entities became critical to the credit markets underpinning the financial system, but were not subject to the same regulatory controls. Further, these entities were vulnerable because they borrowed short-term in liquid markets to purchase long-term, illiquid and risky assets. This meant that disruptions in credit markets would make them subject to rapid deleveraging, selling their long-term assets at depressed prices. He described the significance of these entities: "In early 2007, asset-backed commercial paper conduits, in structured investment vehicles, in auction-rate preferred securities, tender option bonds and variable rate demand notes, had a combined asset size of roughly $2.2 trillion. Assets financed overnight in triparty repo grew to $2.5 trillion. Assets held in hedge funds grew to roughly $1.8 trillion. The combined balance sheets of the then five major investment banks totaled $4 trillion. In comparison, the total assets of the top five bank holding companies in the United States at that point were just over $6 trillion, and total assets of the entire banking system were about $10 trillion." He stated that the "combined effect of these factors was a financial system vulnerable to self-reinforcing asset price and credit cycles."
Causes of the Great Depression
The recession of 1937–38, which slowed down economic recovery from the great depression, is explained by fears of the population that the moderate tightening of the monetary and fiscal policy in 1937 would be first steps to a restoration of the pre March 1933 policy regime.
Causes of the Great Depression
The monetary explanation has two weaknesses. First, it is not able to explain why the demand for money was falling more rapidly than the supply during the initial downturn in 1930–31. Second, it is not able to explain why in March 1933 a recovery took place although short term interest rates remained close to zero and the Money supply was still falling. These questions are addressed by modern explanations that build on the monetary explanation of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz but add non-monetary explanations.
Fascism
The conditions of economic hardship caused by the Great Depression brought about an international surge of social unrest. According to historian Philip Morgan, "the onset of the Great Depression...was the greatest stimulus yet to the diffusion and expansion of fascism outside Italy". Fascist propaganda blamed the problems of the long depression of the 1930s on minorities and scapegoats: “Judeo-Masonic-bolshevik” conspiracies, left-wing internationalism and the presence of immigrants.
Great Depression
By mid-1930, interest rates had dropped to low levels, but expected deflation and the continuing reluctance of people to borrow meant that consumer spending and investment were depressed. By May 1930, automobile sales had declined to below the levels of 1928. Prices in general began to decline, although wages held steady in 1930. Then a deflationary spiral started in 1931. Farmers faced a worse outlook; declining crop prices and a Great Plains drought crippled their economic outlook. At its peak, the Great Depression saw nearly 10% of all Great Plains farms change hands despite federal assistance.
Causes of the Great Depression
There is an ongoing debate between historians as to what extent President Calvin Coolidge's laissez-faire hands-off attitude has contributed to the Great Depression. Despite a growing rate of bank failures he did not heed voices that predicted the lack of banking regulation as potentially dangerous. He did not listen to members of Congress warning that stock speculation had gone too far and he ignored criticisms that workers did not participate sufficiently in the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties.
Causes of the Great Depression
Economists and economic historians are almost evenly split as to whether the traditional monetary explanation that monetary forces were the primary cause of the Great Depression is right, or the traditional Keynesian explanation that a fall in autonomous spending, particularly investment, is the primary explanation for the onset of the Great Depression. Today the controversy is of lesser importance since there is mainstream support for the debt deflation theory and the expectations hypothesis that building on the monetary explanation of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz add non-monetary explanations.
Great Depression
At the time of the Depression, the Soviet economy was growing steadily, fuelled by intensive investment in heavy industry. The apparent economic success of the Soviet Union at a time when the capitalist world was in crisis led many Western intellectuals to view the Soviet system favorably. Jennifer Burns wrote:
Despite all of this, The Great Depression caused mass immigration to the Soviet Union, mostly from Finland and Germany. Soviet Russia was at first happy to help these immigrants settle, because they believed they were victims of capitalism who had come to help the Soviet cause. However, when the Soviet Union entered the war in 1941, most of these Germans and Finns were arrested and sent to Siberia, while their Russian-born children were placed in orphanages. Their fate is unknown.
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.
Causes of the Great Depression
Fisher's debt-deflation theory initially lacked mainstream influence because of the counter-argument that debt-deflation represented no more than a redistribution from one group (debtors) to another (creditors). Pure re-distributions should have no significant macroeconomic effects.
Causes of the Great Depression
Hans Sennholz argued that most boom and busts that plagued the American economy in 1819–20, 1839–43, 1857–60, 1873–78, 1893–97, and 1920–21, were generated by government creating a boom through easy money and credit, which was soon followed by the inevitable bust. The spectacular crash of 1929 followed five years of reckless credit expansion by the Federal Reserve System under the Coolidge Administration. The passing of the Sixteenth Amendment, the passage of The Federal Reserve Act, rising government deficits, the passage of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, and the Revenue Act of 1932, exacerbated the crisis, prolonging it.
America's Great Depression
America's Great Depression is a 1963 treatise on the 1930s Great Depression and its root causes, written by Austrian School economist and author Murray Rothbard. The fifth edition was released in 2000.
Great Depression
The consensus view among economists and economic historians is that the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff exacerbated the Great Depression, although there is disagreement as to how much. In the popular view, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was a leading cause of the depression. However, many economists hold the opinion that the tariff act did not greatly worsen the depression.
Great Depression
Two economists of the 1920s, Waddill Catchings and William Trufant Foster, popularized a theory that influenced many policy makers, including Herbert Hoover, Henry A. Wallace, Paul Douglas, and Marriner Eccles. It held the economy produced more than it consumed, because the consumers did not have enough income. Thus the unequal distribution of wealth throughout the 1920s caused the Great Depression.