“Irrational exuberance in the housing market led many people to buy houses they couldn't afford, because everyone thought housing prices could only go up.” (useconomy.com). During 2006, housing prices started to decline. Many people took out loans with very little money down, and they had to foreclose on the house because if they sold it, they would not get enough money back. With the foreclosing rate increasing, many banks began to freak out because they were going to face huge losses. Around August of 2007, banks become afraid to loan money out due to the fact that they did not want to suffer from losing money yet again.
There are many factors to Hitler’s success. The impact of the Depression was certainly one of them. When the American financial market crashed, it hit particularly hard for the Germans. Germany had taken many loans from America but when the financial market crashed, Germany was unable to take any more loans or pay America back. Because of this inability to repay, businesses started to close down because the loans were rapid and little trade was taking place.
WHY DID THE WALL STREET CRASH HAPPEN IN 1929? The Wall Street crash which happened on 29 October 1929 was one of the most depressing events in the history of America. This happened because people lost their wages b 60%, 14 million people were unemployed by 1933, banks went bust and also US trade slipped from $10 billion to $3 billion. The Wall Street crash happened due to some reasons: one reason was, the Americans were buying consumer goods on credit, especially cars and houses they did this because, they didn’t have enough money, and therefore if they get the money they will be able to pay. Another reason was that speculation was rife, because people believed the stock market was easy so 20 million Americans invested but only 1.5 million people had serious knowledge of the market.
Even though the stock market began to recover some of its losses, by the end of 1930, it just was not enough and America truly entered what is called the Great Depression. Throughout the 1930’s over 9,000 banks failed. Bank deposits were uninsured and therefore as banks failed people simply lost their savings. Surviving banks, unsure of the economic situation and concerned for their own survival, stopped being as willing to create new loans. This worsened the situation leading to less and less expenditures.
The collapse of stock market happened because it had a weak foundation. In fact, it was dependent on borrowed money; banks would lend money to the population to buy shares in the market without making sure the borrowers were able to pay back. Moreover, facing the crisis over nine thousand banks were obliged to close, for they invested their client's savings in the stock market. Going through rough time financially, Americans are drastically forced to reduce their spending which lowered the amount of production; therefore, employers slashed the numbers of employees that caused the unemployment rate to rose from 4.2 in 1928 to 8.7 in 1930 and to 23.6 in 1932. In the middle of the crisis, several social classes experienced a harsh time.
This means that when the credit crunch struck banks were forced to reduce the amount of money they lend to people. This was due to a huge amount of “bad debts”. In other words people started to borrow too much and couldn’t repay it back. Anup Shah, from the Global Issues website says: “The global financial crisis, brewing for a while, really started to show its effects in the middle of 2007 and into 2008. Around the world stock markets have fallen, large financial institutions have collapsed or been bought out, and governments in even the wealthiest nations have had to come up with rescue packages to bail out their financial systems.
The new German Republic faced a large number of political, economic and physical problems at the end of World War I. Having lost World War I they had taken a huge beating, taking huge numbers of casualties and their leader, Kaiser Wilhelm, being forced to abdicate. However I believe that the most serious problem they were facing was bankruptcy due to their ruined economy. Before the war, Germany had been very industrial and powerful, having the third most powerful economy in the world, behind Britain and USA. However after the war their economy had been ruined and there was very little money in he system, leaving them almost as a third world country.
$2,000 marked the poverty line in 1929, and yet 60% of Americans made under this amount. This illustrates the immense unequal distribution of money throughout Americans in that only 40% could meet the bare minimum necessary to live. More than the majority of America was living in poverty, causing unemployment and failure to properly distribute money throughout the nation. This horrible situation plummeted the economy and Americans as a whole as well as individually, which makes I.t a main cause of The Great
When the stock market collapsed on Wall Street in October, 1929, it sent financial markets worldwide into a meltdown this was tragic for the German economy. The German economy was vulnerable because it relied on loans from America and exports to fuel it. German workers were laid off. Along with this, banks failed. Inflation soon followed making it hard for families to purchase expensive necessities with devalued money.
The Great Depression occurred on the morning of October 29, 1929, but there have been many ideas of what actually caused the depression. Money was being unequally shared between the rich and the middle-class, between industry and agriculture, and between the U.S and Europe, which caused an unstable economy(1). Supply and demand was unbalanced so the middle-class couldn’t afford much and the rich didn’t want much. One main conjecture was that the Federal Reserve was the cause of the Great Depression. In 1928 and 1929 the Federal Reserve was worrying about the intensity of the rising level of the stock market.