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Great Depression DBQ

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The Great Depression was the worst economic setback the U.S. has ever endured. It lasted ten long years from 1929 to 1939. It caused severe unemployment, the stock market to crash and massive deflation. The three main causes of the depression were the shutting down of banks, unwise consumer practices and the failure of the farming industry.
To begin with, the first cause of the Great Depression was the bank failures during that time. Prior to the Stock Market Crash of 1929, banks were renting out money to consumers without doing any kind of speculations. The people who rented the money would then go on and invest that money into the stock market not knowing it was going to crash. Once the market crashed, banks were dealt with a huge deficit …show more content…

Banks themselves were to blame as well. Many banks also invested money into the stock market, that the public had deposited in their banks. Once the market crashed the banks lost all of the public's lifetime savings. The panicked citizens then rushed into banks to withdraw as much money they could to save their life earnings. These waves of banking panics would later be called "Bank Runs". A document which supports why bank failures were a cause of the Great Depression is document 4 which states, "First of all let me state the simple fact that when you deposit money in a bank the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit vault. It invests your money in many different forms of credit-bonds, commercial paper, mortgages and many other kinds of loans.'' (Doc. 4 Franklin D. Roosevelt). From this it is shown that the president at that time, Roosevelt, clearly states that the banks were "playing" with the money of the U.S. citizens. This comes to support the prior information because the banks were in fact not keeping the lifesavings of the public safe but instead investing it for their own benefit. Another document

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