Understanding the Great Depression Essay - 2842 Words

It was in 1929 that industrial production declined, business slumped and depression began in the United States. Rising unemployment, falling incomes, increasingly underutilized capacity, the drop in primary-product prices and the collapse of international trade combined to depress the international economy. Property owners felt depressed because their assets were shrinking, manufacturers had to deal with declining sales, building operators experienced a crippling lack of demand, railroad managers were desperate because fewer people utilized the rails, farmers were ruined by deflated prices, wage-earners were facing unemployment and successive wage cuts. Everybody fought the long and arduous, discouraging battle for subsistence. This paper†¦show more content†¦If the nations had cooperated with one another better in dealing with their economic problems, they could have avoided or at least ameliorated the terrible economic losses that all of them suffered during that decade of depression. At the time, a substantial majority of Americans and nearly all foreigners who expressed opinions on the subject believed that the Wall Street Stock Market crash of October 1929 had triggered the Depression, thereby suggesting that the United States was the birthplace of the disaster. The Wall Street downfall triggered declines in other securities markets and led bankers to make borrowing more difficult, which caused a further decline of already depressed commodity prices. In any case, most scholars tend to locate a majority of the underlying causes of the Depression in American events. One thing that the experts at the time did agree on was that the Depression was the downward phase of the business cycle. Awareness that the economic activity went through periodic difficulties that were essentially self-generating first emerged in the nineteenth century. These cycles were a product of the Industrial Revolution. There were periods of economic growth and relative prosperity, others of stagnation and decline. Demographic trends, the opening of new lands, and climatic changes produced these shifts. Random events such as wars, droughts, and epidemics could also alter economic conditions in dramatic fashion. In addition,Show MoreRelatedThe Extent to Which Poor Economic Management of the Great Depression Impacted Australia from the 1920s to 1930s1592 Words   |  7 PagesThe Great Depression was a period of economic contraction and rising unemployment between 1929 and 1933 in Australia and throughout the rest of the world. The Great Depression followed a period of global prosperity and it was triggered by the Wall Street stock market crash on the 24 October 1929 in New York City. 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Even though people are taught about the Great Depression, I personally think that a lot of people do not understand the severity that it caused and the livelihoods that it forever changed. The Great Depression, which lasted over a period of ten years, resulted in a lot of heartache for many nations worldwide (Fraser, 2010). As for the United States, the worst of the Gre at Depression harbored between 1929Read More The Great Depression Essay1716 Words   |  7 Pagesat least heard of the Great Depression that hit America by storm in the early twentieth century. Even though people are taught about the Great Depression, I personally think that a lot of people do not understand the severity that it caused and the livelihoods that it forever changed. The Great Depression, which lasted over a period of ten years, resulted in a lot of heartache for many nations worldwide (Fraser, 2010). As for the United States, the worst of the Great Depression harbored between 1929