Question

How the 1930 Depression affected the financial and the econmic?

Answer 1

How the 1930 Depression affected the financial and the econmic?

• Stock Market Crash of 1929
  • On October 24, 1929, as nervous investors began selling overpriced shares in mass, the stock market crash that some had feared happened at last. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as “Black Thursday.”
  • Five days later, on October 29 or “Black Tuesday,” some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks “on margin” (with borrowed money) were wiped out completely.
  • As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash, the downturn in spending and investment led factories and other businesses to slow down production and begin firing their workers. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased.
  • Many Americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The global adherence to the gold standard, which joined countries around the world in a fixed currency exchange, helped spread economic woes from the United States throughout the world, especially Europe.
• Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration:
  • Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover and other leaders that the crisis would run its course, matters continued to get worse over the next three years. By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had risen to 6 million in 1931.
  • Meanwhile, the country’s industrial production had dropped by half. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America’s towns and cities. Farmers couldn’t afford to harvest their crops, and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved. In 1930, severe droughts in the Southern Plains brought high winds and dust from Texas to Nebraska, killing people, livestock and crops. The “Dust Bowl” inspired a mass migration of people from farmland to cities in search of work.
  • In the fall of 1930, the first of four waves of banking panics began, as large numbers of investors lost confidence in the solvency of their banks and demanded deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans in order to supplement their insufficient cash reserves on hand.
  • Bank runs swept the United States again in the spring and fall of 1931 and the fall of 1932, and by early 1933 thousands of banks had closed their doors.
  • In the face of this dire situation, Hoover’s administration tried supporting failing banks and other institutions with government loans; the idea was that the banks in turn would loan to businesses, which would be able to hire back their employees.
• Economic impact
  • The most devastating impact of the Great Depression was human suffering. In a short period of time, world output and standards of living dropped precipitously. As much as one-fourth of the labour force in industrialized countries was unable to find work in the early 1930s. While conditions began to improve by the mid-1930s, total recovery was not accomplished until the end of the decade.
  • The Great Depression and the policy response also changed the world economy in crucial ways. Most obviously, it hastened, if not caused, the end of the international gold standard. Although a system of fixed currency exchange rates was reinstated after World War II under the Bretton Woods system, the economies of the world never embraced that system with the conviction and fervour they had brought to the gold standard. By 1973, fixed exchange rates had been abandoned in favour of floating rates.
  • Both labour unions and the welfare state expanded substantially during the 1930s. In the United States, union membership more than doubled between 1930 and 1940. This trend was stimulated by both the severe unemployment of the 1930s and the passage of the National Labour Relations (Wagner) Act (1935), which encouraged collective bargaining. The United States also established unemployment compensation and old-age and survivors’ insurance through the Social Security Act (1935), which was passed in response to the hardships of the 1930s. It is uncertain whether these changes would have eventually occurred in the United States without the Great Depression. Many European countries had experienced significant increases in union membership and had established government pensions before the 1930s. Both of these trends, however, accelerated in Europe during the Great Depression.
  • In many countries, government regulation of the economy, especially of financial markets, increased substantially in the 1930s. The United States, for example, established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934 to regulate new stock issues and stock market trading practices. The Banking Act of 1933 (also known as the Glass-Steagall Act) established deposit insurance in the United States and prohibited banks from underwriting or dealing in securities. Deposit insurance, which did not become common worldwide until after World War II, effectively eliminated banking panics as an exacerbating factor in recessions in the United States after 1933.
  • The Great Depression also played a crucial role in the development of macroeconomic policies intended to temper economic downturns and upturns. The central role of reduced spending and monetary contraction in the Depression led British economist John Maynard Keynes to develop the ideas in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Keynes’s theory suggested that increases in government spending, tax cuts, and monetary expansion could be used to counteract depressions. This insight, combined with a growing consensus that government should try to stabilize employment, has led to much more activist policy since the 1930s. Legislatures and central banks throughout the world now routinely attempt to prevent or moderate recessions. Whether such a change would have occurred without the Depression is again a largely unanswerable question.