The Great Depression

What you'll learn

• ✓Explain the 1929 crash
• ✓Describe the gold standard's role

Lessons

1. 🌧️
   The Cliff

   October 1929 and the three years that followed
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2. The Roaring Bubble

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3. From Crash to Depression

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4. The Policy Response

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5. Britain vs. America

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6. Final Boss: Lessons That Wrote 2008

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Sources

All content is drawn from the sources below. We deliberately avoid unverified material.

• A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963)
  Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, Princeton University Press / NBER · academic
  Source for the Fed's failure to act and the roughly one-third contraction in the US money supply between 1929 and 1933, used in lessons 3 and 6.
• Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 (1992)
  Barry Eichengreen, Oxford University Press · book
  Backs the international transmission argument and the comparison between Britain (off gold September 1931) and the US, used in lessons 3 and 5.
• Exchange Rates and Economic Recovery in the 1930s (1985)
  Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey Sachs, Journal of Economic History · academic
  Empirical paper showing countries that left gold earlier recovered earlier, used in lesson 5.
• The Great Crash 1929 (1955)
  John Kenneth Galbraith, Houghton Mifflin · book
  Source for the speculative climate, broker call loans, RCA's run-up, and the Black Monday and Black Tuesday narrative, used in lessons 1 and 2.
• Stock Market Crash of 1929
  Federal Reserve History · institutional
  Backs the Dow peak-to-trough numbers (381 to 41), the two crash days, and the unemployment figure, used in lesson 1.
  https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/stock-market-crash-of-1929
• The Great Depression
  Federal Reserve History · institutional
  Overview source for the full 1929 to 1933 sequence and the Fed's policy stance, used across lessons 1, 3, and 4.
  https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-depression
• Historical Statistics on Banking
  Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) · data
  Source for the roughly 9,000 to 10,000 US bank failures between 1930 and 1933, used in lesson 3.
  https://banks.data.fdic.gov/explore/historical
• FRED Economic Data
  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis · data
  Standard data source for US industrial production, money supply (M2), and unemployment estimates referenced across lessons 1, 3, and 5.
  https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
• On Milton Friedman's Ninetieth Birthday (speech, November 8, 2002)
  Ben S. Bernanke, Federal Reserve Board · institutional
  Source for the 'we did it. We're sorry. But we won't do it again' line and the Fed's institutional acknowledgment of its 1930s failure, used in lesson 6.
  https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021108/
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
  John Maynard Keynes, Macmillan · book
  Origin of the liquidity trap concept used in lesson 6.
• The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (1973)
  Charles P. Kindleberger, University of California Press · book
  Standard reference for the collapse in world trade after Smoot-Hawley and the international politics of the 1930s slump, used in lesson 4.
• Smoot-Hawley Tariff
  Office of the Historian, US Department of State · institutional
  Backs the June 1930 signing of Smoot-Hawley and its effect on US trade policy, used in lesson 4.
  https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/protectionism