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Great Depression Dbq

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The Great Depression is one of many big mistakes in history that is important to remember and learn from. A event that left 25% of Americans unemployed and many in so much debt that children had to skip meals. There’s no real crisis at hand to blame for this situation, so what caused the great depression in the 1930s? The Great Depression was caused by installment buying/speculation, maldistribution of income, and overproduction. The stock market was a huge factor in the events leading up to, and during the great depression. Americans saw profit in buying stocks with dividends. In John T. Raskobs’ Everybody Ought to be Rich, he advertises “If he invests in good common stock and allows the dividends … to accumulate he will at the end of twenty years have at least eighty thousand dollars” (Doc. 2). The promise of eighty thousand is a pretty good deal, but the one major problem; the twenty years it takes to accumulate. Some people wanted to make a profit sooner, so they bought and sold stocks. This was much more risky, however because stock prices could go up or down, but was much quicker than waiting on dividends to add up. This process is called speculation and ended up being a huge mistake for people when the depression hit because the values of their …show more content…

Another problem that went hand in hand with speculation is that of buying things with money that you don’t have. This way of life was relatively new and “with debt no longer regarded as shameful,

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