In the 1930s, there was a severe worldwide economic depression. It was considered as the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. It was called the Great Depression. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations. Although the Great Depression was relatively mild in some countries, it was severe in others, particularly in the United States. By 1928, Germany, Brazil, and the economies of Southeast Asia were depressed. By early 1929, the economies of Poland, Argentina, and Canada were contracting, and the U.S. economy followed in the middle of 1929. In almost every country of the world, the Great Depression caused drastic declines in output, severe unemployment, and acute deflation. Its social and cultural effects were no less astounding, especially in the United States, where the Great Depression represented the harshest adversity faced by Americans since the Civil War. The Great Depression is often called a “defining moment” in the twentieth-century history of the United States.
Economic historians usually point the start of the Great Depression to the sudden devastating collapse of US stock market prices on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. Some dispute this conclusion, and see the stock crash as a symptom, rather than a cause of the Great Depression. It was an ordinary recession in the summer of 1929, when the Great Depression began in the United States. The downturn became markedly worse, however, in late 1929 and continued