On Thursday October 24, 1929 at 10:00am the stock market bell went off at the New York Stock Exchange, stocks were plummeting down. Montgomery ward’s shares were selling for $83.00; the shares were previously $156.00 per share. That day will be forever known in history as “Black Thursday”. The crash led to bigger problems our society would endure; it would turn out to, to be the worst recession our country would ever have. Many people think that the market crash was the cause of the depression, the crash weakened our economy therefore making us less resistant towards any existing defects, and those defects could multiply rapidly and bring down the whole nation.

The Great Depression did not just happen there were many factors that contributed to the depression like the United States international credit system, economic dependency, and international trade policies. The big struggle for the American people was the grueling journey of the depression that would last 11 years. Before the stock market crashed the economy was booming, months preceding the crash, stocks steadily rose in the summer with a total of $67 billion dollars, up from $27 billion i

n 1925. The problem was that our nation had become dependent on a few industries like the automobile and construction but the main driver of our economy was the stock market. When the economy depends on a couple of industries to drive the economy you have nothing to fall back and when those industries start to decline it creates a domino effect. The stock market had become the economy, which worried President Hoover who gave a warning on April 29 that publicly alerted people about stock speculation. Hoover wired his broker to sell some of his shares. The economy was doing very well and we all know what goes up must come down. It is a normal progression of the capitalistic economic cycle to endure market slow downs. World War I created an unstable economy for the world, Great Britain was the world’s creditor and after the war America assumed that role. 1914 through 1918 America gave loans to our allied nations, which totaled at $11 billion, and with foreign investments the $11 billion became $15.7 billion. Our government did not want to forgive loans that our allies owed us for the war they so that had to refinance the existing loans which caused debts to pile on top of another. A third of the $15.7 billion would end up going to Europe, in forms of loans many of those loans would end up in Germany. Since we gave Germany those loans, they were not able to make reparation payments to our allies as agreed in the Treaty of Versailles. If our allies did not receive reparation payments from Germany, the allies would not be able to pay America back the billions of dollars they borrowed. The result of this stunted our economy while Europe’s economy grew and became more industrialized therefore not needing much of American goods anymore which in turn limited our exporting revenues. When the market crashed,

Some topics in this essay:
American Europe’s, Stock Exchange, Treaty Versailles, World War, Public Administration, President Hoover, War II, Tariff Act, Dark Age, Germany Germany, stock market, dust bowl, pump money economy, reparation payments, international trade, depression 11, market crash, market crashed, europe’s economy, stock market economy, dust storms, market economy,