Great Depression Dbq

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The great depression was a very hard time for almost all Americans. In 1930 there were 5 million people unemployed and it was up to 13 million by the end of 1932 in America. Almost all of America was classified as poor and didn’t have a living wage and most of America was falling apart. The three most impactful reasons that the Great Depression happened in the United States was because of the stock market crash, unregulated banking institutions, and overextension of credit/excess consumerism.
The stock market crashing in 1929 caused many Americands to fear for their investments and money they had. Many people in the 1920s and 1930s didn’t have extra money or saving so they would buy on margin, basically borrowing money from people to buy stocks. Since that happened many of the brokers made margin calls and demanded their money back. Since almost everybody could’t pay them back because the stock fell so much they were in debt to them. Investors sold their stocks for up to a loss of 4 billion dollars. On October 29, 1929 the stock market crashed by 12 percent by the end of the day. Many people realized that Americans was starting to go into an economic depression from this crash. …show more content…

Even the people who didn’t owe money to the brokers ran to the bank because they saw how the stock market was crashing down drastically. When everyone started running to the bank for their money, the bank was left with nothing left. This caused people to lose everything they had, all their money! Also in this time period banks weren’t responsible for people’s money because they were not regulated by the government. This caused people to lose everything they had worked for and furthering the

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