Great Depression Dbq Essay

585 Words3 Pages

The context of the Great Depression is the roaring twenties. At the end of world war one, a new era of prosperity came to America. At the heights of prosperity, the stock market exchange began to rapidly expand as more people began to trade. The Great Depression was caused by installment buying and the crash of the stock market. The first reason the Great Depression happened is that people were buying more than they can afford which is called installment buying. For example, a person is buying stocks but they keep buying way more than they can afford taking out all the loan money that they need to make the purchase. Which is also called Speculation which can be shown in document 4, In 1929 the unemployment rate was at a good low percentage. Until many people started to take out big chunks of money from banks expecting …show more content…

But, they won't be able to pay them back because of how much debt they have and they also didn't have a flow of income because they had lost their jobs. Document 8 describes an ad for a new boat that's very luxurious. It then goes on to explain how one may pay for a stock model for only ten thousand dollars. This ad hooked a lot of people due to the amount of installment buying that continued causing debt to follow many Americans. The number of consumers overbought the product and there weren't more boats to send out. Finally, document 10 was a prediction of the Great Depression. Elmer Davis explained that installment buying is causing pain to America from the number of loans that are adding up together. This caused the Great Depression by causing banks to close because of the amount of money being taken out