casual analysis essay

Great Depression was an immense tragedy for Americans. It was the beginning of involvement of government in the economy. After a decade of prosperity and optimism, the United States of America was thrown in despair on October 1929. The whole stock market got crashed and the Great Depression began officially. That day is known as Black Tuesday. There was no hope of the recovery of stock prices. Masses of Americans tried to sell all the stock but there was no buyer. At that time, the stock market became the path of bankruptcy. After the crash of stock market, the banks had to close forcefully as they had invested the savings of their clients in the stock market. This caused a lot of panic and people rushed to the opened banks for withdrawing their money.

The Great Depression caused the unemployment to reach 25% and the wages of employed people fell by 42%. During the Great Depression, many farmers lost their farms and they had to travel to California in search of work. Years of erosion, plus the Dust Bowl in Midwest were some of the causes of less agriculture at that time. Causes of the Great Depression include several mistakes of Fed as well. First, the rate of the Fed Funds kept on rising through a recession and led to the crash of the stock market in October 1929. Secondly, a run on dollar was caused in September 1931 due to spectaculars, who started to sell dollars for gold. Also the Fed raised the interest rates for the preservation of the value of dollar; this restricted the money availability for businesses and caused bankruptcies. The impact of the Great Depression caused 1616 banks and 20,000 companies to go bankrupt, 12 million people were out of work and more than 23,000 Americans committed suicide. Charities gave out shelter and food for free because no system was established for the unemployed.

The president was Herbert Hoover, a Republican, and he did not help the unemployed people. He believed that if you were in trouble you should help yourself and not expect others to help you (historylearningsite.co.uk). This he called as "rugged individualism." He always used to say that the world of depression cannot last forever and the prosperity is around the corner. Hoover did do a few good things such as he built the Hoover Dam to create jobs. He also gave three hundred million dollars to the states for helping unemployed. Unfortunately only thirty million of that money was used as those states were run by Republicans, who believed in the "rugged individualism."