Analyze The Causes Of The Great Depression

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The 'Great Depression' was one of the biggest and most important economic crisis in US history. Many different things are attributed to causing this depression. After lasting for many years, certain programs and domestic policy changes were implemented by President Franklin Roosevelt with the purpose of boosting the economy, helping lower the unemployment rate, and protecting the country from another such depression.
The very first step and sign of the Great Depression and it's economic impact was seen during 1929, when companies's stocks were being mostly overvalued and many people decided to invest in the stock market, seeing it as a great way to make huge returns. This helped many of these people justify taking out loans from investors which …show more content…

One of the causes is said to be that the vulnerability of banks to large and popular cash withdrawals due to laws that disallowed any bank to open other branches in different states and sometimes in different cities or districts. This caused some banks to be overwhelmed during the initial cash withdrawals after the stock market crash and therefore close down. However, most bank failures occurred in rural areas, whereas in urban areas many banks made it through the Great Depression with only slight problems. This might also pinpoint the sharp decrease in agriculture as one of the benefactors to these failures. That would explain the great problems plaguing most banks in these rural and agriculturally dependant …show more content…

After money months of people waiting for the government to beging to try to correct the situation, Herbert a Hoover decided that the best way to help people was to decrease the unemployment rate. His idea for doing this was to "start the largest peacetime government expenditure program in the nation's history at the time, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which originally lent money to companies to encourage them to keep people working to lower the unemployment rate." The RFC gave out nearly $2 billion dollars in loans to different corporations (banks, businesses, railroads, mortgage associations) and it remained active through World War II until it was disbanded in 1957 when the government decided that the economy could then grow by itself. A very large problem with the methods of the RFC was that they did not make sure that 100% of the 'incentive money' was going towards new employees's salaries, or if the company just took the money to pay already existing employees higher wages. This was one of the things that caused the government to take on a more 'hands-on' approach in helping the

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