Cause Of The Great Depression

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It seems that the greatest contributing factor to the Great Depression were in fact the Roaring Twenties. As it goes, for the greatest market stability, there needs to be some middle grounds between the highest crest and the lowest trough. There needs to be somewhat of a resting point, just like in a real wave. When the good gets to be too good, and growth has the inability to slow down, a crash within the market is more than inevitable. At this point, it is usually already in play. Following the idea that a bad low can result from a high, which is how we can see the Great Depression got its feet on the ground even in the later parts of the highs in the twenties, we have the Great Recession. A similar thing has happened here, as in …show more content…

Finally, it can be seen that the overall percentage of people in the population who are in the labor force has been dropping at a substantial rate. When all these factors are put into play, the estimated 10% unemployment through the Great Recession turns out being much higher and more proportional to the population as the 25% was for the Great Depression. Moving on, as time has shown, and the years through the thirties has shown, the Great Depression saw some of the most tragic bank panics and horrible bankruptcies the world had seen to that point. Banks were shutting down left and right, leaving people with less and less money, and causing stocks to be reduced to nothing. Funny enough, even though it seems individuals are no longer being devastated by the shortcomings of these banks at the scale they were during the Great Depression, banks are still going down. Goldman Sachs, for an example, has stayed in business, among others like it, due to the fact the Federal Reserve System has been backing them to guarantee no failures of huge banking corporations. This order was not put into place until after the Great Depression occured. As another similarity, we can see how many people have come to live like maybe this day could be …show more content…

Even through all these similarities, there remain to be a couple of major differences. The Great Depression really and truly ravaged our country, and it seems the scale at which it did so is far larger than what the Great Recession has done to us. It is not like we take a walk around outside and find turmoil on every major city street we come across. The name “Great Depression” really served its purpose, as the country truly was in a depression. Recently, we have just simply gone through a recession, even though it has been quite a magnified one. Our country has grown through the time and we have learned through our past mistakes, so things have not been as horrible as they once were or could be. One of the biggest differences, and possibly the biggest factor contributing to how the Great Recession has been perceived and handled compared to the Great Depression, is our current monetary policies. Back in the twenties and thirties, money was backed by metals, such as gold and silver. This was not a good thing for anyone, and this was soon learned. The Federal Reserve System had little power to help encourage growth and get money back into regulation throughout the market because of this, so the people had little help in

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