What Are The Causes Of The Great Depression

The Great Depression was the worst period of economic decline in U.S. history. It began on October 29th, 1929, and was officially declared over, in the year 1939, once the second World War was commenced. There were many factors that both influenced, and made the Great Depression even worse. A few examples of this are: During this time period, many Americans had money invested in the stock market, and once they saw that somebody else began to sell their stocks, they sold their own. On October 29th, people began to sell their stocks at an extremely rapid rate. Due to the rapid rate of stocks being sold, people lost countless amounts of money, and eventually ran to the bank to get whatever they had in there, out. However, these banks were loaning …show more content…
Another example of this is Herbert Hoover’s ideas of laissez-faire, which was the idea of the government staying out of the economy. Obviously Herbert Hoover was president during the Great Depression, and that made people hate him already, but it was the actions he took that put him in the position to blame for the depression. Herbert Hoover had a few ideas of how to help the depression, but they didn’t worked, they actually made matters worse. As a result of the depression Hoover began to lower income taxes, but this new cut gave the public very little extra spending money. He also helped pass a tariff, which is a tax on certain types of good that is imported or exported, but this tariff actually deepened and prolonged the depression. Not to mention it also caused other countries to raise their tariffs too. Now, Herbert Hoover was president during America’s lowest economic downfall in U.S. history and that’s hard to come by, so it shouldn’t be looked at as entirely being his fault. However, once Herbert’s term was up, he ran for election again, against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During this election, FDR won by a landslide due to the fact that everybody blamed Hoover for the