My assignment for this week is to write about the causes and effects of the Great Depression.  The great depression was caused by the roaring twenties, when everybody made risky investments in the stock market. When the market showed signs of quavering, everybody tried to sell their stocks at once, causing the stock market to completely crash.  People freaked out, and they ran to the banks to get their money out.  The banks had lost money in the stock market as well, so they couldn’t give everybody their  money and instead shut down.  Meanwhile, midwestern farmers had overused their soil, and when a windstorm came through, the area became a dust bowl.  The Smoot-Hawley Tariff tried to help them, but backfired when other countries imposed strict tariffs of their own.  The Great Depression caused more government involvement in business, stricter regulations inforced on the stock market, and made people more thrifty and untrusting of the banks.  In order to prevent this, people could have held on to their stocks and not tried to retrieve all their money from the banks.  The government in the 1920’s could have been more concerned about the economy and had more programs like the FDIC before the stock market crash.  After all, good times never last.

Peter Gea