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Economic Depression

Great Depression
• The Great Depression in Outline
• The Great Crash
• Even a Panic Is Not All Together a Bad Thing
• Debt-Deflation
• Golden Fetters
• The Persistence of the Great Depression
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The Great Depression in Outline
It is straightforward to narrate the slide of the world into the Great Depression. The 1920's saw a stock market boom in the U.S. as the result of general optimism: businessmen and economists believed that the newly-born Federal Reserve would stabilize the economy, and that the pace of technological progress guaranteed rapidly rising living standards and expanding markets. The U.S. Federal Reserve's attempts in 1928 and 1929 to raise interest rates to discourage stock speculation brought on an initial recession.

Caught by surprise, firms cut back their own plans for further purchase of producer durable goods; firms making producer durables cut back production; out-of-work consumers and those who feared they might soon be out of work cut back purchases of consumer durables, and firms making consumer durables faced falling demand as well.
Falls in prices--deflation--during the Depression set in motion contractions in production which riggered additional falls in prices. With prices falling at ten percent per year, investors could calculate that they would earn less profit investing now than delaying investment until next year when their dollars would stretch ten percent further. Banking panics and the collapse of the world monetary system cast doubt on everyone's credit, and reinforced the belief that now was a time to watch and wait. The slide into the Depression, with increasing unemployment, falling production, and falling prices, continued throughout Herbert Hoover's Presidential term.
There is no fully satisfactory explanation of why the Depression happened when it did. If such depressions were always a possibility in an unregulated capitalist economy, why weren't there two,...