The Great Depression Revisited
The Great Depression Revisited

Author: K. Brunner

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 940098135X

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The fateful days of the great stock market crash entered modem history almost 50 years ago to this day. The cyclic turning point of the U. S. economy oc curred, however, around June 1929, and economic activity receded substantial ly over the subsequent months. The onset of an economic downswing thus became clearly visible before the famous crash. But the October event stays in the public's mind as the symbol of the Great Depression. For nearly four years, until the spring of 1933, the U. S. economy plunged into a deep reces sion. Activity declined, prices fell, and there emerged a massive unemploy ment problem. The economy ultimately overcame this shock in 1933. Prices rose rapidly in spite of substantial margins of unusual resources. Activity ex panded, but occasionally at a somewhat hesitant rate. The expansion, however, was interrupted by another recession of major proportions during 1937-38. The tragic sequence of events shaped public consciousness and influenced new approaches and views in economic policymaking. The activist approach to "stabilization policy" and a wide range of regulatory policies were essentially justified in terms of this experience. These policies were crucially influenced by our understanding and interpretation of the Great Depression. The view of a radically unstable economic process perennially on the edge of serious collapse gained wide popularity and became a central element of the Keynesian tradi- 2 INTRODUCTION tion. It encouraged, with supplementary interpretations, an interventionist and expanding role of the government in our economic affairs.

The Great Depression Revisited
The Great Depression Revisited

Author: H. van der Wee

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 9401098492

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For a quarter of a century the industrial Western world has been living in the euphoria of continuous improvements in welfare, based on economic programming, increasing integration and terms of trade which favor indus trial countries and discriminate against agricultural regions. It is true that recessions have periodically recurred during these years : time and again, however, government intervention succeeded in reducing them to mere "in ventory cycles". In contrast with the twenties and thirties, when economic policy in the West focused on fighting unemployment and stimulating investment, the postwar period has been characterized by a permanent concern to curb inflationary pressure, which was partly due to full-employ ment. The present welfare economy has given rise to a growth of the pro pensity to consume such that public policy has often been constrained to limit consumption and stimulate saving. In this new framework it has perhaps been forgotten that today's welfare owes much to the lessons from the past. The bitter world crisis experience of the thirties in particular has exerted a fruitful and decisive influence upon the search for means to prevent, eliminate or soften the cyclical fluctuations which the process of economic growth involves. Forty years after the out break of the greatest economic crisis ever, it seems useful to draw up the balancesheet of the lessons learned from it. There exists a large literature about the depression of the thirties.

The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression Revisited
The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression Revisited

Author: Gabriel Patrick Mathy

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781303443329

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The United States of the 1930s experienced unprecedented uncertainty including the stock market crash of October 1929, a severe banking crises, major political changes, the breakdown of the gold standard, uncertain monetary policies, and the uncertainties surrounding the brewing World War. This dissertation constructs and analyzes four uncertainty measures: stock volatility, a newspaper index of uncertainty mentions, credit spreads, and a high volatility indicator of uncertainty shock events. These four uncertainty measures are then used to analyze the effect of uncertainty shocks on the American economy of the 1930s. I begin with an introduction of the issue of the Great Depression in macroeconomics and where this dissertations fits in the existing literature. The first chapter, entitled "Identifying Uncertainty Shocks in the American Great Depression," uses a financial econometric test of volatile returns to identify periods of high uncertainty, which are then matched with plausible uncertainty shock events by a careful study of the historical record. In the second chapter, entitled "Modelling Uncertainty Shocks in the U.S. Great Depression," a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model is calibrated to conditions of the 1930s. This model is then simulated for an uncertainty shocks, and the simulations show that nominal rigidites and passive monetary policies help explain why uncertainty shocks would matter more in the Great Depression. The third chapter, entitled "The Empirics of Uncertainty Shocks in the U.S. Great Depression," discusses previous empirical results regarding uncertainty in the Great Depression, and then derives empirical results using vector autoregressions to quantify the effect of uncertainty on the broader macroeconomy in the data. Based on these multifaceted sources of evidence, I find that uncertainty shocks played a significant role in the U.S. Great Depression.

America's Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Attempt to Reorganize the Market with His New Deal
America's Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Attempt to Reorganize the Market with His New Deal

Author: Kevin Theinl

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2011-10

Total Pages: 41

ISBN-13: 3656017603

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Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7, University of Rostock, language: English, abstract: Between World War I and World War II the USA experienced a mixed development of their economy. On the one hand there was the economic prosperity in the 1920s and the epoch of reconstruction after 1933, as well known as the "New Deal." But also very important to consider is the economic crisis, called the "Great Depression" between 1929 and 1935. At the end of the 1920's, there was an increase in prosperity in the United States. Especially this period was shaped by Jazz music, sports and technical breakthroughs. Also many Americans made money investments in stocks, and after the value of stocks rose steadily, a lot more people could afford the standard of good living, which contained to drive brand new and expensive cars and to attend movie theaters and sumptuous clubs. When on Thursday, October 24, and on Tuesday, October 29 in 1929, the Wall Street stock market in New York collapsed, the "Roaring Twenties" were suddenly over within one week. Those two days are also called "Black Thursday" and "Black Tuesday".