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2 of The Greatest Stock Market Collapses

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2 of The Greatest Stock Market Collapses

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Written by Devin Heyduk & Brianna Ouellette

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The Great Depressions Affect on Canada: Website 1

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The Great Depressions Affect on Canada: Website 1

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The great depression happened because of a devastating stock market collapse that sent ripples of recession across the planet. One of the countries that were affected most was Canada. Because of this, many Canadians were left jobless, hungry, and in some cases, homeless. The great depression is the very reason for social services creation and is still used to this day. By the year 1933, Canadas Spending had dropped by 40 percent. Spending wasn't the only thing affected during these times: Birth rate, immigration, and exports were also affected drastically.  It wasn't until World War II that employment rates finally started increasing again. In essence, World War II was one of the main reasons Canada was able to resuscitate the economy, pulling us out of the great depression.

I chose this website because it had a great deal of information on the effects of the great depression in Canada. Something I found interesting was that the thing that pulled Canada and many other countries out of the great depression, was in fact World War II.

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This website provides information about the market crash in '08 like how it happened, why it happened and the effects of it. The market crash in '08 happened because lenders became more lenient with their lending standards to extend credit to those less qualified; this resulted with lots of people taking out loans they couldn't afford and then this caused housing prices to escalate to where people could not afford them.

This website was chosen because it gives a very good summary of what happened in '08 to where even people who don't understand the stock market all that well can understand what had happened back then.

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The stock market crash of 2008 was the biggest single-day drop in history up to that point. The aftermath of this catastrophic financial event wiped out big chunks of Americans' retirement savings and affected the economy long after the stock market recovered.

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This website describes the effects of the collapse in Canada, and Canada vs. US banking comparing what happened to them and what we had done differently. They mention that unlike the US, Canada's banking system was created as a system of large financial institutions where their size actually helped them in the long run; this website also mentions that the US has been experiencing bank failures since the 1930s whereas Canada has had no such thing. Although Canada's economic collapse was as traumatic as the US's, none of our banks failed like theirs.

I chose this website because although we know what happened in the US with the Market Crash, it's important for us as Canadians to know how it effected us.

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Why Canada Didn't Have a Banking Crisis in 2008

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When European and North American banks teetered on the brink of meltdown in 2008, requiring bailouts and extraordinary central bank intervention, Canadian banks escaped relatively unscathed. History explains why, according to co-authors Michael Bordo , Angela Redish , and Hugh Rockoff in Why Didn't Canada Have a Banking Crisis in 2008 (or in 1930, or 1907, or ...)?

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What Caused The Great Depression (Market Collapse of 1929)

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What Caused The Great Depression (Market Collapse of 1929)

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The great depression was by far the worst and longest recession in the industrial age to this date. The stock market collapse happened because in the 1920s, there was exponential economic growth. This lead to America doubling its national wealth. Because of this, many people started investing into stocks. By the year 1929, production started reducing which in turn increased unemployment, leaving the stock market as a whole, extremely overvalued. Despite things taking a turn for the worse, the stocks continued to climb until eventually it all came crashing down. On October 24th, 1929, anxious investors began to dump their overvalued stocks all at once. On the day known as "Black Thursday",  12.9 million shares were sold which only induced more fear, and in just 5 days later, resulted in "Black Tuesday" with another 16 million shares sold. Because of this, millions of shares were deemed worthless, leaving many investors wiped out completely and the average person broke. Many people were forced to rely on credit cards and to go in debt. By 1930, industrial production was approximately cut in half and people began to wonder if banks could be trusted with their money, so everyone withdrew all their savings. The banks didn't have enough money to pay everyone back and had to start liquidating loans to pay off the deposits. This continued over the next 3 years. As you can see, this is a short list of the many events that lead to a catastrophic domino affect.

I chose this website because it was very informative on the events that lead to the stock market crash that caused the event known as "The Great Depression". One piece of information I found useful was that it wasn't solely one thing that lead to the recession. It was a large amount of things that built up over just a few years.

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Contents

1. What Caused the Great Depression?

2. Stock Market Crash of 1929

3. Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration

4. Roosevelt Elected

5. The New Deal: A Road to Recovery

6. African Americans in the Great Depression

7. Women in the Great Depression

8. Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins

9. PHOTO GALLERIES

The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country's banks had failed.

What Caused the Great Depression?

Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed " the Roaring Twenties."

The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, was the scene of reckless speculation, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured their savings into stocks. As a result, the stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929.

By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stock prices much higher than their actual value. Additionally, wages at that time were low, consumer debt was proliferating, the agricultural sector of the economy was struggling due to drought and falling food prices and banks had an excess of large loans that could not be liquidated.

The American economy entered a mild recession during the summer of 1929, as consumer spending slowed and unsold goods began to pile up, which in turn slowed factory production. Nonetheless, stock prices continued to rise, and by the fall of that year had reached stratospheric levels that could not be justified by expected future earnings.

Stock Market Crash of 1929

On October 24, 1929, as nervous investors began selling overpriced shares en masse, the stock market crash that some had feared happened at last. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as "Black Thursday."

Five days later, on October 29 or "Black Tuesday," some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks "on margin" (with borrowed money) were wiped out completely.

As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash, the downturn in spending and investment led factories and other businesses to slow down production and begin firing their workers. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased.

Many Americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The global adherence to the gold standard, which joined countries around the world in a fixed currency exchange, helped spread economic woes from the United States throughout the world, especially Europe.

Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration

Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover and other leaders that the crisis would run its course, matters continued to get worse over the next three years. By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had risen to 6 million in 1931.

Meanwhile, the country's industrial production had dropped by half. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America's towns and cities. Farmers couldn't afford to harvest their crops, and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved. In 1930, severe droughts in the Southern Plains brought high winds and dust from Texas to Nebraska, killing people, livestock and crops. The " Dust Bowl " inspired a mass migration of people from farmland to cities in search of work.

In the fall of 1930, the first of four waves of banking panics began, as large numbers of investors lost confidence in the solvency of their banks and demanded deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans in order to supplement their insufficient cash reserves on hand.

Bank runs swept the United States again in the spring and fall of 1931 and the fall of 1932, and by early 1933 thousands of banks had closed their doors.

In the face of this dire situation, Hoover's administration tried supporting failing banks and other institutions with government loans; the idea was that the banks in turn would loan to businesses, which would be able to hire back their employees.

Roosevelt Elected

Hoover, a Republican who had formerly served as U.S. secretary of commerce, believed that government should not directly intervene in the economy, and that it did not have the responsibility to create jobs or provide economic relief for its citizens.

In 1932, however, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression and some 15 million people (more than 20 percent of the U.S. population at the time) unemployed, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election.

By Inauguration Day (March 4, 1933), every U.S. state had ordered all remaining banks to close at the end of the fourth wave of banking panics, and the U.S. Treasury didn't have enough cash to pay all government workers. Nonetheless, FDR (as he was known) projected a calm energy and optimism, famously declaring "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Roosevelt took immediate action to address the country's economic woes, first announcing a four-day "bank holiday" during which all banks would close so that Congress could pass reform legislation and reopen those banks determined to be sound. He also began addressing the public directly over the radio in a series of talks, and these so-called " fireside chats " went a long way towards restoring public confidence.

During Roosevelt's first 100 days in office, his administration passed legislation that aimed to stabilize industrial and agricultural production, create jobs and stimulate recovery.

In addition, Roosevelt sought to reform the financial system, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ( FDIC) to protect depositors' accounts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock market and prevent abuses of the kind that led to the 1929 crash.

The New Deal: A Road to Recovery

Among the programs and institutions of the New Deal that aided in recovery from the Great Depression were the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and hydroelectric projects to control flooding and provide electric power to the impoverished Tennessee Valley region, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943.

When the Great Depression began, the United States was the only industrialized country in the world without some form of unemployment insurance or social security. In 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which for the first time provided Americans with unemployment, disability and pensions for old age.

After showing early signs of recovery beginning in the spring of 1933, the economy continued to improve throughout the next three years, during which real GDP (adjusted for inflation) grew at an average rate of 9 percent per year.

A sharp recession hit in 1937, caused in part by the Federal Reserve's decision to increase its requirements for money in reserve. Though the economy began improving again in 1938, this second severe contraction reversed many of the gains in production and employment and prolonged the effects of the Great Depression through the end of the decade.

Depression-era hardships had fueled the rise of extremist political movements in various European countries, most notably that of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. German aggression led war to break out in Europe in 1939, and the WPA turned its attention to strengthening the military infrastructure of the United States, even as the country maintained its neutrality.

African Americans in the Great Depression

One-fifth of all Americans receiving federal relief during the Great Depression were black, most in the rural South. But farm and domestic work, two major sectors in which blacks were employed, were not included in the 1935 Social Security Act, meaning there was no safety net in times of uncertainty. Rather than fire domestic help, private employers could simply pay them less without legal repercussions. And those relief programs for which blacks were eligible on paper were rife with discrimination in practice, since all relief programs were administered locally.

Despite these obstacles, Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," led by Mary McLeod Bethune, ensured nearly every New Deal agency had a black advisor. The number of African-Americans working in government tripled.

Women in the Great Depression

There was one group of Americans who actually gained jobs during the Great Depression: Women. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million Though they'd been steadily entering the workforce for decades, the financial pressures of the Great Depression drove women to seek employment in ever greater numbers as male breadwinners lost their jobs. The 22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also created an increase in single women in search of employment.

Women during the Great Depression had a strong advocate in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who lobbied her husband for more women in office-like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position.

Jobs available to women paid less, but were more stable during the banking crisis: nursing, teaching and domestic work. They were supplanted by an increase in secretarial roles in FDR's rapidly-expanding government. But there was a catch: over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administration's wage codes set lower wages for women, and jobs created under the WPA confined women to fields like sewing and nursing that paid less than roles reserved for men.

Married women faced an additional hurdle: By 1940, 26 states had placed restrictions known as marriage bars on their employment, as working wives were perceived as taking away jobs from able-bodied men - even if, in practice, they were occupying jobs men would not want and doing them for far less pay.

Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins

With Roosevelt's decision to support Britain and France in the struggle against Germany and the other Axis Powers, defense manufacturing geared up, producing more and more private sector jobs.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to America's entry into World War II, and the nation's factories went back in full production mode.

This expanding industrial production, as well as widespread conscription beginning in 1942, reduced the unemployment rate to below its pre-Depression level. The Great Depression had ended at last, and the United States turned its attention to the global conflict of World War II.

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PHOTO GALLERIES

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What Caused the Great Depression? Stock Market Crash of 1929 Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration Roosevelt Elected The New Deal: A Road to Recovery African Americans in the Great Depression Women in the Great Depression Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins PHOTO GALLERIES The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939.

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The Great Depression Explained in One Minute

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The Great Depression Explained in One Minute

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The great depression was a world wide recession that put many countries greatly in debt. It started in 1929 because of a stock market collapse and lasted until the late 1930s. By 1932 American stocks were only worth 1/5th than they were, in 1933 half of all banks closed their doors forever, and 750 thousand farms were lost due to bankruptcy, and financial issues in 1935. Every country was greatly affected, including Germany. Germany had a 25 percent unemployment rate and It's believed that this is what gave Hitler and the Nazi Government Party their chance to become elected which ultimately led to World War II and many horrendous war crimes.

This video was chosen, because it gave a lot of interesting information all in under a minute. Something that I found informative is how Hitler was able to win the election and come into power all due to the stock market crash, which resulted in the great depression.

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The Great Depression Explained in One Minute

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In the year 1918, World War I had just ended 4 years prior, and America is going through cultural change, and economic growth as it enters into the 1920s (the roaring 20s). Soldiers had just came back from the war, production and projects are reviving again and everything is going fantastic. Technology is making great advances such as the radio and other house hold appliances. Because companies were making so much money they started paying their employees more who then started investing into company stocks, and getting loans from banks to buy more stocks. Banks eventually began to borrow money from their clients and started investing in stocks as well. As stocks continued to climb manufacturers decreased in production and sales because companies had over estimated their own growth. As mentioned in a previous post this is what gave way to the market collapse. Over time investors began to second guess the market and On "Black Thursday", a news paper released a headline that said "Prices of stocks CRASH in Heavy Liquidation." Which set the path of a downward spiral as soon as markets opened.

I chose this video, because it gave some additional information that I had not yet encountered. Something I learned was the minor but interesting details of why the stock market collapse happened that were simply overlooked in previous videos and websites.

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The Great Depression - 5 Minute History Lesson

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1. What did you learn about the topic that surprised you most?

Devin: The thing that surprised me the most was the fact that the great depression lasted for about a decade and the only thing that repaired the economy, was the beginning  of World War II.

Brianna: That the failure of banking in the US could affect the whole world like it did. It's kind of scary.

2. Provide a real-life example of how this topic is relevant or interesting for you.

Devin: Back in 2008, I remember there was a recession and it was stated that it was almost as bad as the great depression. At the time I was really young but was always curious as to how stocks and the economy worked and the causes for a recession.

Brianna: We've already had people playing with a stock market during covid, big example being GameStop.

3. If you could pass on your knowledge to a family member or friend, what do you think is the most important thing to pass on?

Devin: It would be to never get a loan to invest, or don't invest with your money that you can't afford to lose.

Brianna: Make sure that whatever loan you're getting or mortgage, you can actually pay it back when it comes time.

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The After Math of a Stock Market Collapse (Photo)

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The After Math of a Stock Market Collapse (Photo)

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This is a photo that shows how tough times got not long after the market collapse. Unemployment rates skyrocketed, America had a 25.6 percent unemployment rate and Canada had a staggering 30 percent!

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This video is as it's titled: it's a 5 minute history lesson of the Financial Crisis. Despite the short length of the video the information relayed is super thorough and helps give you a better understanding as to what happened in '08. Basically investors were looking for a new way to make money so they looked towards mortgages, but little did they know by doing this it would later cause the whole stock market to collapse, not just in the US but all over the world.

I chose this video because as I had previously stated, it's a good way to get a better understanding of what actually had caused the market crash in '08.

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The 2008 Financial Crisis - 5 Minute History Lesson

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This video is a compilation of news channels, prominently in the US and the UK, going over how well the stock markets were doing before the crash, and then going over and showing how much they dropped and how quickly. It really is chaotic and is unfortunate that the effects of what happened in the US hit countries all around the world as well.

I chose this video because it's one thing to hear about what happened in '08 but it's a whole different thing to actually see it happening because you can see how stressed and panicked these people are.

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This is a photo of a graph showing the drop and the timeline of what had happened with some nice little imagery to go along with it. This photo mentions the Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy much like the video by The Plain Bagel did.

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