1929 Great Depression

Banking panics and monetary contraction
The next blow to aggregate demand occurred in the fall of 1930, when the first of four waves of banking panics gripped the United States. A banking panic arises when many depositors simultaneously lose confidence in the solvency of banks and demand that their bank deposits be paid to them in cash. Banks, which typically hold only a fraction of deposits as cash reserves, must liquidate loans in order to raise the required cash. This process of hasty liquidation can cause even a previously solvent bank to fail. The United States experienced widespread banking panics in the fall of 1930, the spring of 1931, the fall of 1931, and the fall of 1932. The final wave of panics continued through the winter of 1933 and culminated with the national “bank holiday” declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 6, 1933. The bank holiday closed all banks, and they were permitted to reopen only after being deemed solvent by government inspectors. The panics took a severe toll on the American banking system. By 1933, one-fifth of the banks in existence at the start of 1930 had failed.
Scholars believe that such declines in the money supply caused by Federal Reserve decisions had a severely contractionary effect on output. A simple picture provides perhaps the clearest evidence of the key role monetary collapse played in the Great Depression in the United States. The figure shows the money supply and real output over the period 1900 to 1945. In ordinary times, such as the 1920s, both the money supply and output tend to grow steadily. But in the early 1930s both plummeted. The decline in the money supply depressed spending in a number of ways. Perhaps most important, because of actual price declines and the rapid decline in the money supply, consumers and businesspeople came to expect deflation; that is, they expected wages and prices to be lower in the future. As a result, even though nominal interest rates were very low, people did not want to borrow, because they feared that future wages and profits would be inadequate to cover their loan payments. This hesitancy in turn led to severe reductions in both consumer spending and business investment. The panics surely exacerbated the decline in spending by generating pessimism and loss of confidence. Furthermore, the failure of so many banks disrupted lending, thereby reducing the funds available to finance investment.