the great depression

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I. Introduction The Great Depression was a heavy economic depression in the decade before World War II. An economic depression is defined as a substantial and sustained shortfall of the ability to purchase goods relative to the amount that could be produced using current resources and technology.[1] The Great Depression affected most national economies in the world throughout the 1930s. The depression mostly affected industrial countries such as USA and United Kingdom, and caused the increase in unemployment. Also, construction sector almost stopped, the price of agricultural products declined markable, and the farmers and rural people were affected adversely. The mining was also the most affected sector due to unexpected decline in demand. Economic historians usually consider that the start of depression is the sudden collapse of US stock markets on October 29, also known as Black Tuesday. And among the problems involved in assesing the causes of depression none is more intractable than the responsibility to be assigned to the stock market crash. The rise of mass unemployment is considered as a result of the crash, however the crash is not the sole event that caused the depression. The Wall Street Crash is usually seen as having the greatest impact on the events that followed and consequently is widely accepted as pointing the devastating economic circumstances that led to the Great Depression. True or not, the consequences were terrible for almost everybody. Most academic experts agree on one aspect of the crash: Billions of dollars of wealth vanished in one day, and this immediately depressed consumption. .II. Body - Causes and Effects 1. How It Started The world economy seemed to have recovered from the devastation of... ... middle of paper ... ...ome issues such as social security. Until 1935, states -except Wisconsin- had behind the times insurance laws, or much worse these programs were underfunded and as a result almost worthless. The United States became a country where its people were trying to overcome the depression without any social security nationally. Consequently, the most significant program of 1935 was undoubtly the Social Security Act. It aimed to bring innovation to the country in terms of retirement pensions, unemployment insurance. Also Roosevelt insisted that it should be funded by payroll taxes rather than from the general fund; he said, "We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

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