The Rise Of The Great Depression - 1283 Words

When you think about the late 1920’s-1930 in the economic sense the first and possibly only thing that would come to mind is the Great Depression. Started by the stock market crash of October 1929, it had put many of the investors into an economic downspin. This caused consumer spending and investments to drop dramatically, â€Å"investments fell nearly 80 percent between 1929 and 1933†^1. This also led many companies to go out of business forcing them to lay off their employees. At the peak of the Great Depression around thirteen million Americans were unemployed. This also included government employees. In fact â€Å"government workers, declined about 24 percent between 1929 and 1933 and remained 18 percent below it 1929 level in 1939†^2. Banks†¦show more content†¦The stock market crash was the first of chain events that would put the United States into the longest economic crisis it would ever see. The year of 1929 was an odd one due to the fact tha t businesses were expanding, but employees were still being under paid so much that due to business expansion the workers could not fuel it any longer. This is why the stock market crash was inevitable. Only due to the fact that companies profits were rising but employees were still poor leading to dropped spending on the consumers part. When stock holders got news of what was going on they started to pull and sell their shares. Sold shares â€Å"recorded 13 million on â€Å"Black Thursday† [and around] four days later another 16 million shares were sold after another wave of panic†. This led to a downfall of events, such as businesses started firing employees and the ones that were not fired got pay cuts. â€Å"Most Americans fell into debt leaving them to fall into foreclosures†. In the time of the Great Depression banks did not run on the guarantees with costumers. At this time most Americans had their life savings in the banks, and in the fall of 1931-1933 thousands of banks went under. Leaving millions of Americans to lose all they had to the banks failure. â€Å"President Hoover [tried to] help the banks by giving them loans [thinking that] the