The Great Depression In The 1920's

You ever sit back as a college student and think ‘wow I’m poor” or “things are expensive when you don’t make that much”. Well that has been a common feeling for the generation that went through the great depression and also the great recession. I have been thinking about that a lot lately as I work fulltime and raise cattle while going to school thinking how am I going to make ends meet? Well the bad think about that is we are pretty well out of the recession. As I have been thinking about that lately I have sat back and thought about what the time during the great depression that happened in the 1920’s- 1930’s and the great recession that happened just a few years ago in the late 2000’s must have been like for workers and business owners.

In the 1920’s the United States had the largest economy in the world. That was soon to turn around and bite us. In this time in history, the richest one percent of the United States owned over one third of the countries assets. Because of the fact, that so much money was in such few hands the room for growth or expansion for those who did not have much money. It was hard to expand your small business and start your own even before the stock market crashed. In this time automobiles were becoming the new thing to own so everyone was spending their money on those goods so they had stretched their debt capacities to the roof. Calvin Coolidge was the president when all this started. His term ended in 1929 and that is when Herbert hoover took over the office for one term. He inherited all the bad problems that were already in effect that Coolidge started. People doubted hoover on what exactly he could do to help the economy and get the nation back together. He tried and people started losing even more jobs so that affected any decision that he tried to make in order to help the economy. On October 24 1929, the day everyone knows as “black Friday” everyone got scared and started to sell all of their stocks that caused prices to decrease because of the fact that there were so many stocks. The more stocks bought the prices rise causing the value per stock to rise because there is less of them. When more stocks were poured into the market the prices decreased in a hurry, so large banks bought thousands of those stocks. The next Tuesday the bottom really fell out of the market and people started selling them for even less money then bought for. Banks lent out money for those stocks and when it crashed realized that they were not going to be paid back for those dollars lent. Which in turned caused people to go bankrupt and banks to