The Great Depression .
On Thursday October 24, 1929 at 10:00am the stock market bell went off at the New York Stock Exchange, stocks were plummeting down. Montgomery ward's shares were selling for $83.00; the shares were previously $156.00 per share. That day will be forever known in history as "Black Thursday". The crash led to bigger problems our society would endure; it would turn out to, to be the worst recession our country would ever have. Many people think that the market crash was the cause of the depression, the crash weakened our economy therefore making us less resistant towards any existing defects, and those defects could multiply rapidly and bring down the whole nation. .
The Great Depression did not just happen there were many factors that contributed to the depression like the United States international credit system, economic dependency, and international trade policies. The big struggle for the American people was the grueling journey of the depression that would last 11 years. Before the stock market crashed the economy was booming, months preceding the crash, stocks steadily rose in the summer with a total of $67 billion dollars, up from $27 billion in 1925. The problem was that our nation had become dependent on a few industries like the automobile and construction but the main driver of our economy was the stock market. When the economy depends on a couple of industries to drive the economy you have nothing to fall back and when those industries start to decline it creates a domino effect. The stock market had become the economy, which worried President Hoover who gave a warning on April 29 that publicly alerted people about stock speculation. Hoover wired his broker to sell some of his shares. The economy was doing very well and we all know what goes up must come down. It is a normal progression of the capitalistic economic cycle to endure market slow downs.