America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The breakdown of the American family's having a disastrous impact on our economy.
Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.
The 1930s had been a time of tremendous economic distress. And the unemployment rate was enormously high by any historic standard.
The financial crisis and the Great Recession demonstrated, in a dramatic and unmistakable manner, how extraordinarily vulnerable are the large share of American families with very few assets to fall back on. We have come far from the worst moments of the crisis, and the economy continues to improve.
Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.
They were the darkest of times, the years following the crash of the stock market in 1929. Thousands of people across the United States were cast out of their Jobs, off their farms, out of their homes and apartments, and into the crushing depths of poverty.
The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.
An entire nation, it seemed, was standing in one long breadline, desperate for even the barest essentials. It was a crisis of monumental proportions. It was known as the Great Depression.
It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression.
Understanding the true causes of the Depression, as well as the real economic record of the United States in the 1930s, is an essential ingredient in anyone's economic and historical education.
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