The Great Depression :: essays research papers

Introduction It should be noted that all of the cures have been tried and while we seem to be free of Depressions, it's not clear that business cycles have been eliminated. Causes The Stock Market Crash The Stock Market Crash in October of 1929 is often cited as the beginning of the Great Depression, but did it actually cause it? The answer is no. First, the stock price for a particular company merely reflects current information about the future income stream of that company. Thus, it is a change in available information that changes the stock price. When the Fed began to raise interest rates in early 1929, this began the tumble. However, a stock market crash could cause people to increase their liquidity preference which might lead them to hoard money. In the August 1990 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Christine D. Romer writes that "the negative effect of stock market variability is more than strong enough to account for the entire decline in real consumer spending on durables that occurred in late 1929 and 1930." Hoarding Money People hoard money because they have a liquidity preference. I.e., people want to have their assets in a readily convertible form, such as money. There are several misconceptions about hoarding money. First hoarding is not the same thing as saving. If I put my money into a savings account, that money is lent out to someone else who then spends it. Second, hoarding, by itself, cannot cause a recession or depression. As long as prices and wages drop instantly to reflect the lower amount of money in the economy, then hoarding causes no problems. Indeed, hoarding can even be seen as beneficial to those who don't hoard, since their money will be able to buy more goods as a result of the lower prices. If a country has a gold standard, then hoarding money can make the money supply drop dramatically since a gold standard makes the quantity of money difficult for the government to control. The Gold Standard At the time of the Great Depression,America had a 100% gold standard for its money. This meant that all cash was backed by a government promise to redeem it in a specific amount of gold (at the time, one ounce of gold was redeemable for twenty dollars). Because the amount of money circulating in the economy is wholly dependent on the amount of gold available, the money supply is very rigid.