John Galbraith The Great Depression

In the book, The Great Crash of 1929, the author, John Galbraith, provided insight on the events that took place which lead to the crash of Wall Street in 1929, as well as the Great Depression. During class we learned the different views of the causes of the Great Depression from both a supply sider view, and a demand sider view. After reading this book I am able to say that John Galbraith has the perspective of a demand sider. John Galbraith is a Canadian who earned his PhD in agricultural economics. Before 1929 there was not the idea of macroeconomics, and the overall poor intelligence of economics. Galbraith is quoted as saying,” "economists and those who offered economic counsel in the late twenties and early thirties were almost

Money is lost everyday in the stock market but the problem was, people were borrowing the money from the banks and when all of their money was lost they were unable to pay the banks back. That money that is loaned out for people to invest in the stock market was money that was in people’s savings accounts, so ultimately when people came to collect their money there was none left in their accounts. Another “get rich quick method”, which was presented in the book, was the housing market in Florida. Houses were being purchased at a very high rate in Florida in the 1920’s due to many reasons. One of the reasons is because of the weather in Florida. Warmer weather is endured year round compared to the rest of the country. Also, the winter storms are a lot less severe compared to the northern cities. People were trying to make a quick buck by purchasing land in Florida, then selling it to people who wanted to move to Florida because of the weather. The land owners believed that the nice weather would be able to inflate the price of the land, and they would be able to make a lot of money off this, and providing little effort. Unfortunately, this did not work out for the land owners. Two major hurricanes swept through the area and devastated the highly desired land.