1929 Great Depression

Causes of the decline
The fundamental cause of the Great Depression in the United States was a decline in spending (sometimes referred to as aggregate demand), which led to a decline in production as manufacturers and merchandisers noticed an unintended rise in inventories. The sources of the contraction in spending in the United States varied over the course of the Depression, but they cumulated in a monumental decline in aggregate demand. The American decline was transmitted to the rest of the world largely through the gold standard. However, a variety of other factors also influenced the downturn in various countries.
Stock market crash
The initial decline in U.S. output in the summer of 1929 is widely believed to have stemmed from tight U.S. monetary policy aimed at limiting stock market speculation. The 1920s had been a prosperous decade, but not an exceptional boom period; prices had remained nearly constant throughout the decade, and there had been mild recessions in both 1924 and 1927. The one obvious area of excess was the stock market. Stock prices had risen more than fourfold from the low in 1921 to the peak in 1929. In 1928 and 1929, the Federal Reserve had raised interest rates in hopes of slowing the rapid rise in stock prices. These higher interest rates depressed interest-sensitive spending in areas such as construction and automobile purchases, which in turn reduced production. Some scholars believe that a boom in housing construction in the mid-1920s led to an excess supply of housing and a particularly large drop in construction in 1928 and 1929.
By the fall of 1929, U.S. stock prices had reached levels that could not be justified by reasonable anticipations of future earnings. As a result, when a variety of minor events led to gradual price declines in October 1929, investors lost confidence and the stock market bubble burst. Panic selling began on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929. Many stocks had been purchased on margin—that is, using loans secured by only a small fraction of the stocks’ value. As a result, the price declines forced some investors to liquidate their holdings, thus exacerbating the fall in prices. Between their peak in September and their low in November, U.S. stock prices (measured by the Cowles Index) declined 33 percent. Because the decline was so dramatic, this event is often referred to as the Great Crash of 1929.