Great Depression: soup kitchen
Category: Money
- Date:
- 1929 - c. 1939
- Location:
- EuropeUnited States
- Key People:
- Herbert HooverFranklin D Roosevelt
Top Questions
What was the Great Depression?
The Great Depression, which began in the United States in 1929 and spread worldwide, was the longest and most severe economic downturn in modern history. It was marked by steep declines in industrial production and in prices (deflation), mass unemployment, banking panics, and sharp increases in rates of poverty and homelessness.
What were the causes of the Great Depression?
Four factors played roles of varying importance. (1) The stock market crash of 1929 shattered confidence in the American economy, resulting in sharp reductions in spending and investment. (2) Banking panics in the early 1930s caused many banks to fail, decreasing the pool of money available for loans. (3) The gold standard required foreign central banks to raise interest rates to counteract trade imbalances with the United States, depressing spending and investment in those countries. (4) The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930) imposed steep tariffs on many industrial and agricultural goods, inviting retaliatory measures that ultimately reduced output and caused global trade to contract.
Read more below: Economic history: Causes of the decline
How did the Great Depression affect the American economy?
In the United States, where the Depression was generally worst, industrial production between 1929 and 1933 fell by nearly 47 percent, gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 30 percent, and unemployment reached more than 20 percent. Because of banking panics, 20 percent of banks in existence in 1930 had failed by 1933.
Read more below: Economic history: Economic impact
How did the United States and other countries recover from the Great Depression?
Three factors played roles of varying importance. (1) Abandonment of the gold standard and currency devaluation enabled some countries to increase their money supplies, which spurred spending, lending, and investment. (2) Fiscal expansion in the form of increased government spending on jobs and other social welfare programs, notably the New Deal in the United States, arguably stimulated production by increasing aggregate demand. (3) In the United States, greatly increased military spending in the years before the country’s entry into World War II helped to reduce unemployment to below its pre-Depression level by 1942, again increasing aggregate demand.
Read more below: Economic history: Sources of recovery
When did the Great Depression end?
In most affected countries, the Great Depression was technically over by 1933, meaning that by then their economies had started to recover. Most did not experience full recovery until the late 1930s or early 1940s, however. The United States is generally thought to have fully recovered from the Great Depression by about 1939.
Read more below: Economic history: Sources of recovery
Great Depression, worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world, sparking fundamental changes in economic institutions, macroeconomic policy, and economic theory. Although it originated in the United States, the Great Depression caused drastic declines in output, severe unemployment, and acute deflation in almost every country of the world. Its social and cultural effects were no less staggering, especially in the United States, where the Great Depression represented the harshest adversity faced by Americans since the Civil War.
Economic history
The timing and severity of the Great Depression varied substantially across countries. The Depression was particularly long and severe in the United States and Europe; it was milder in Japan and much of Latin America. Perhaps not surprisingly, the worst depression ever experienced by the world economy stemmed from a multitude of causes. Declines in consumer demand, financial panics, and misguided government policies caused economic output to fall in the United States, while the gold standard, which linked nearly all the countries of the world in a network of fixed currency exchange rates, played a key role in transmitting the American downturn to other countries. The recovery from the Great Depression was spurred largely by the abandonment of the gold standard and the ensuing monetary expansion. The economic impact of the Great Depression was enormous, including both extreme human suffering and profound changes in economic policy.
Timing and severity
The Great Depression began in the United States as an ordinary recession in the summer of 1929. The downturn became markedly worse, however, in late 1929 and continued until early 1933. Real output and prices fell precipitously. Between the peak and the trough of the downturn, industrial production in the United States declined 47 percent and real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 30 percent. The wholesale price index declined 33 percent (such declines in the price level are referred to as deflation). Although there is some debate about the reliability of the statistics, it is widely agreed that the unemployment rate exceeded 20 percent at its highest point. The severity of the Great Depression in the United States becomes especially clear when it is compared with America’s next worst recession, the Great Recession of 2007–09, during which the country’s real GDP declined just 4.3 percent and the unemployment rate peaked at less than 10 percent.
The Depression affected virtually every country of the world. However, the dates and magnitude of the downturn varied substantially across countries. Great Britain struggled with low growth and recession during most of the second half of the 1920s. The country did not slip into severe depression, however, until early 1930, and its peak-to-trough decline in industrial production was roughly one-third that of the United States. France also experienced a relatively short downturn in the early 1930s. The French recovery in 1932 and 1933, however, was short-lived. French industrial production and prices both fell substantially between 1933 and 1936. Germany’s economy slipped into a downturn early in 1928 and then stabilized before turning down again in the third quarter of 1929. The decline in German industrial production was roughly equal to that in the United States. A number of countries in Latin America fell into depression in late 1928 and early 1929, slightly before the U.S. decline in output. While some less-developed countries experienced severe depressions, others, such as Argentina and Brazil, experienced comparatively mild downturns. Japan also experienced a mild depression, which began relatively late and ended relatively early.
Britannica Quiz
Pop Quiz: 15 Things to Know About the Great Depression
The general price deflation evident in the United States was also present in other countries. Virtually every industrialized country endured declines in wholesale prices of 30 percent or more between 1929 and 1933. Because of the greater flexibility of the Japanese price structure, deflation in Japan was unusually rapid in 1930 and 1931. This rapid deflation may have helped to keep the decline in Japanese production relatively mild. The prices of primary commodities traded in world markets declined even more dramatically during this period. For example, the prices of coffee, cotton, silk, and rubber were reduced by roughly half just between September 1929 and December 1930. As a result, the terms of trade declined precipitously for producers of primary commodities.
The U.S. recovery began in the spring of 1933. Output grew rapidly in the mid-1930s: real GDP rose at an average rate of 9 percent per year between 1933 and 1937. Output had fallen so deeply in the early years of the 1930s, however, that it remained substantially below its long-run trend path throughout this period. In 1937–38 the United States suffered another severe downturn, but after mid-1938 the American economy grew even more rapidly than in the mid-1930s. The country’s output finally returned to its long-run trend path in 1942.
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Recovery in the rest of the world varied greatly. The British economy stopped declining soon after Great Britain abandoned the gold standard in September 1931, although genuine recovery did not begin until the end of 1932. The economies of a number of Latin American countries began to strengthen in late 1931 and early 1932. Germany and Japan both began to recover in the fall of 1932. Canada and many smaller European countries started to revive at about the same time as the United States, early in 1933. On the other hand, France, which experienced severe depression later than most countries, did not firmly enter the recovery phase until 1938.
