The great depression is almost mythical to many younger people growing up in America today. Every child has heard stories from a grandparent or read about the depression in a book. However, not many people known the true cause of the depression and how the depression was not limited to the United States. The great depression of occurred because of three main reasons and left the country trying to recover for the next decade. .
The first major cause of the depression was an unequal distribution of wealth among the American citizens. A mere .1 percent of Americans held a whopping 42 percent of the nations wealth. An illustration would be if there were only 1,000 people left in the world and there was only 1000 dollars left but money was the key mean of survival, one person would hold 42 percent of the money. In the example, the one person would have $ 420 while the rest of the people would have an average of .58 cents to live off. With the uneven amount of money around, the average American family earned $750 dollars. At the same time, Henry Ford made fourteen million dollars. If that is compared to today's standards, the average family makes 18,500 dollars. If Ford's personal revenue would have grown at the same pace, he would make over 345 million dollars a year, today. To further add to the wealth problem, Americans did not save any of their money they did possess. An astonishing 80 percent of Americans didn't save their money. .
Because Americans didn't save their money they ran into the second cause for the great depression: debt. The debt was caused by a large amount of overproduction of food and goods. Americans were able to produce large amounts of goods because of their new industrial advances. However, the people had saved no money to buy these items. Americans couldn't afford the goods produced which lead to massive storage problems and no revenue for people selling the goods. Because American couldn't buy the goods on their own, they bought items on credit.