What Caused The Great Depression

It seems that I have found the biggest causes of the Great Depression. The causes appeared to have ranged from the stock market crashing, to the Smoot-Hawley tariff and many other reasons in between. The country was unprepared for something like this so no wonder this Depression was the worst in the history of terrible economic circumstances. The Stock Market Crash of March, 1929, was the start of the terrifying Depression. Investors traded 16 million dollars in shares on the New York stock exchange in a single day. Billions were lost which is what wiped out thousands of investors. Even after the March crash, nobody attempted to try to prevent further crashes of the stock market. That leads to the next stock market crashing in October of
In December 1931, New York’s Bank of the United States failed. They had more than $200 million in deposits which made it the largest single bank failure in America’s history. Between 1921 and 1929, more than 600 banks had failed and nobody thought anything of it because they were only in small towns. Little did they know, the bank failure would grow. People also bought stocks with the intentions of buying now and paying later, but nobody ever paid later. When stocks went down, people sold out because they were afraid of making no profit. Therefore, the banks lost their money. Due to the previous causes of the Great Depression, people weren’t able to buy goods as easily as they were before. A lot of the nation’s wealth fell into the hands of the rich leaving less for the other Americans. Factories were producing more while consumers were buying less which led to a large percentage of factories being shut down. No factories, no jobs, no money. In 1929 the average amount of income to support a family was $2500. 40% of people earned less than $1500 annually. Hourly wages in coal mines were 84.5 cents an hour in 1923 and then ending at 62.5 cents in