The Great Depression of the early twentieth century is widely considered the most devastating economic downturn that the developed world has ever seen. Industrial output was severely affected across Europe, and in Germany alone, it fell to just 58 percent of its pre-Depression level by 1932. Other Central European countries, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia, also saw their output fall to just sixty percent of their pre-Depression levels, while output in Western and Northern Europe declined by much less. By 1937/8, almost a decade after the Wall Street Crash, most of these countries saw their industrial output increase above its pre-Depression level. Germany saw its output increase to 132 percent of its 1928 output, as it emerged as Europe's strongest economy shortly before the beginning of the Second World War.
From March to July 1933, US industrial production rose 57 percent. We show that an important source of recovery was the effect of dollar devaluation on farm prices, incomes, and consumption. Devaluation immediately raised traded crop prices, and auto sales grew more rapidly in states and counties most exposed to these price increases. The response was amplified in counties with more severe farm debt burdens. For plausible assumptions about farmers' relative MPC, the incidence of higher farm prices, and the aggregate multiplier, this redistribution to farmers accounted for a substantial portion of spring 1933 growth. This farm channel thus provides an example of how the distributional consequences of macroeconomic policies can have large aggregate effects. That recovery in 1933 benefited from redistribution to farmers suggests an important limitation to the use of 1933 as a guide to the effects of monetary regime changes in other circumstances.
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This contains the dataset of the 1936 household consumption survey and 1930 census data used in "Fiscal Policy and Economic Recovery: The Case of the 1936 Veterans' Bonus." The underlying household survey data come from ICPSR study 08908. The Census data come from the IPUMS 5% sample from the 1930 Census. The primary data file is urban_lprob.dta. urban_nodups.dta contains a subset of these data for programming convenience. For further documentation, see the paper, and the data and program files posted on the American Economic Review's website.
Over the course of their first terms in office, no U.S. president in the past 100 years saw as much of a decline in stock prices as Herbert Hoover, and none saw as much of an increase as Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) - these were the two presidents in office during the Great Depression. While Hoover is not generally considered to have caused the Wall Street Crash in 1929, less than a year into his term in office, he is viewed as having contributed to its fall, and exacerbating the economic collapse that followed. In contrast, Roosevelt is viewed as overseeing the economic recovery and restoring faith in the stock market played an important role in this.
By the end of Hoover's time in office, stock prices were 82 percent lower than when he entered the White House, whereas prices had risen by 237 percent by the end of Roosevelt's first term. While this is the largest price gain of any president within just one term, it is important to note that stock prices were valued at 317 on the Dow Jones index when Hoover took office, but just 51 when FDR took office four years later - stock prices had peaked in August 1929 at 380 on the Dow Jones index, but the highest they ever reached under FDR was 187, and it was not until late 1954 that they reached pre-Crash levels once more.
The Long Depression was, by a large margin, the longest-lasting recession in U.S. history. It began in the U.S. with the Panic of 1873, and lasted for over five years. This depression was the largest in a series of recessions at the turn of the 20th century, which proved to be a period of overall stagnation as the U.S. financial markets failed to keep pace with industrialization and changes in monetary policy. Great Depression The Great Depression, however, is widely considered to have been the most severe recession in U.S. history. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the country's economy collapsed, wages fell and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. It would take almost four years for recovery to begin. Additionally, U.S. expansion and integration in international markets allowed the depression to become a global event, which became a major catalyst in the build up to the Second World War. Decreasing severity When comparing recessions before and after the Great Depression, they have generally become shorter and less frequent over time. Only three recessions in the latter period have lasted more than one year. Additionally, while there were 12 recessions between 1880 and 1920, there were only six recessions between 1980 and 2020. The most severe recession in recent years was the financial crisis of 2007 (known as the Great Recession), where irresponsible lending policies and lack of government regulation allowed for a property bubble to develop and become detached from the economy over time, this eventually became untenable and the bubble burst. Although the causes of both the Great Depression and Great Recession were similar in many aspects, economists have been able to use historical evidence to try and predict, prevent, or limit the impact of future recessions.
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ABSTRACT By contrasting the Great Depression and the Coronacrisis, we demonstrate that narrative economics (Shiller, 2017) is key in the analysis of economic fluctuations. We note the importance of the populist narrative to understand the economic and health outcomes of the Coronacrisis in Mexico and highlight the role of the predominance of different economic paradigms in economic policy decision-making. We suggest that, just as in 1929, by following orthodox primary fiscal balance sheet policies at the cost of contracting government investment, the Mexican economy will undergo a long and painful recovery process compared to its global peers.
During the Great Depression in the United States in 1930s, the federal government's share of relief spending in major cities changed drastically following the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. The previous administration of President Herbert Hoover oversaw the beginning of the depression in 1930, however federal spending on relief was virtually non-existent until his final year in office, and the share of overall relief spending was just two percent in 1932.
With Roosevelt's New Deal, the U.S. government established various agencies and programs that provided relief for its citizens. This included the introduction of social security systems, as well as the creation of public works programs which created government jobs in areas such as construction and infrastructure. In later years, economic recovery also allowed for the expansion of these programs into areas such as disability benefits, and per capita relief spending more than doubled from 1933 to 1936.
This paper uses the historical narrative record to determine whether inflation expectations shifted during the second quarter of 1933, precisely as the recovery from the Great Depression took hold. First, by examining the historical news record and the forecasts of contemporary business analysts, we show that inflation expectations increased dramatically. Second, using an event-study approach, we identify the effect of the key events that shifted inflation expectations on financial markets. Third, we gather new evidence—both quantitative and narrative—that indicates that the shift in inflation expectations played a causal role in stimulating the recovery.
In a survey conducted in September 2020, regarding consumer perception surrounding the economic recovery after coronavirus (COVID-19) in India, 31 percent of the respondents are positive that the economy will bounce back to pre-COVID levels in the next few months. Majority of the respondents disagree that COVID-19 would cause a significant recession or a major economic depression.
On October 29, 1929, the U.S. experienced the most devastating stock market crash in it's history. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 set in motion the Great Depression, which lasted for twelve years and affected virtually all industrialized countries. In the United States, GDP fell to it's lowest recorded level of just 57 billion U.S dollars in 1933, before rising again shortly before the Second World War. After the war, GDP fluctuated, but it increased gradually until the Great Recession in 2008. Real GDP Real GDP allows us to compare GDP over time, by adjusting all figures for inflation. In this case, all numbers have been adjusted to the value of the US dollar in FY2012. While GDP rose every year between 1946 and 2008, when this is adjusted for inflation it can see that the real GDP dropped at least once in every decade except the 1960s and 2010s. The Great Recession Apart from the Great Depression, and immediately after WWII, there have been two times where both GDP and real GDP dropped together. The first was during the Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 until June 2009 in the US, although its impact was felt for years after this. After the collapse of the financial sector in the US, the government famously bailed out some of the country's largest banking and lending institutions. Since recovery began in late 2009, US GDP has grown year-on-year, and reached 21.4 trillion dollars in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic and the associated lockdowns then saw GDP fall again, for the first time in a decade. As economic recovery from the pandemic has been compounded by supply chain issues, inflation, and rising global geopolitical instability, it remains to be seen what the future holds for the U.S. economy.
Between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the end of the Great Depression in the late 1930s, the Soviet Union saw the largest growth in its gross domestic product, growing by more than 70 percent between 1929 and 1937/8. The Great Depression began in 1929 in the United States, following the stock market crash in late October. The inter-connectedness of the global economy, particularly between North America and Europe, then came to the fore as the collapse of the U.S. economy exposed the instabilities of other industrialized countries. In contrast, the economic isolation of the Soviet Union and its detachment from the capitalist system meant that it was relatively shielded from these events. 1929-1932 The Soviet Union was one of just three countries listed that experienced GDP growth during the first three years of the Great Depression, with Bulgaria and Denmark being the other two. Bulgaria experienced the largest GDP growth over these three years, increasing by 27 percent, although it was also the only country to experience a decline in growth over the second period. The majority of other European countries saw their GDP growth fall in the depression's early years. However, none experienced the same level of decline as the United States, which dropped by 28 percent. 1932-1938 In the remaining years before the Second World War, all of the listed countries saw their GDP grow significantly, particularly Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Coincidentally, these were the three most powerful nations during the Second World War. This recovery was primarily driven by industrialization, and, again, the U.S., USSR, and Germany all experienced the highest level of industrial growth between 1932 and 1938.
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More than 700,000 people worldwide die by suicide every year, and the number of suicide attempts is estimated as 20 times higher, most of them being associated with psychiatric disorders, especially major depression. Knowledge about effective methods for preventing suicide attempts in individuals at high risk for suicide is still scarce. Dysregulation of the neuroendocrine stress response system, i.e., the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis, is one of the most consistent neurobiological findings in both major depression and suicidality. While the HPA axis is mostly overactive in depression, individuals with a history of suicide attempts exhibit an attenuated hormonal response to stress. It is unknown, however, whether the HPA axis is constantly attenuated in repeated suicide attempters or whether it regains normal responsivity after recovery from depression. Using the combined dexamethasone suppression/corticotropin-releasing hormone (dex/CRH) test, we assessed HPA axis regulation in acute depression (N = 237) and after recovery with respect to previous suicide attempts. Patients without previous suicide attempts show normalization of the stress hormone response to the second dex/CRH (basal ACTH response and cortisol response) after recovery from acute depression, while patients with multiple previous SA show an increased ACTH response. The change in HPA axis responsivity in patients with only one previous SA lies between the response patterns of the other groups with no change in HPA axis reactivity. Our findings suggest that patients with a history of suicide attempts belong to a subgroup of individuals that exhibit a distinct pattern of stress hormone response during acute depression and after recovery. Future studies may extend our approach by investigating additional psychological stress tasks to gain a broader understanding of the stress pathology of recurrent suicide attempters.
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Taylor (2019) details heterogeneity in the effects of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) across industries and across time. Through first the President’s Reemployment Act (PRA) and then industry-specific “codes of fair competition,” the NIRA raised wages and restricted working hours. In some–but far from all–cases industries also used a NIRA code to collude, raising prices and restricting output. The effect of the NIRA peaked in fall 1933 and winter 1934; thereafter, compliance declined. I review the intellectual history of the NIRA, the implementation of the PRA and the NIRA codes, and Taylor’s econometric evidence on their effects. I end with a discussion of the implications of Taylor’s book for understanding the effect of the NIRA on U.S. recovery from the Great Depression.
Between 1820 and 1957, over 4.5 million people emigrated from Great Britain to the United States. The period with the highest levels of migration came during the 1860s, 70s and 80s, with almost 110 thousand people migrating in 1888 alone. The period with the lowest levels of migration came in the 1930s and early 40s, as the Great Depression caused an economic crisis across the globe, hitting the US and Great Britain particularly hard. Economic recovery in the late 1930s caused the migration rate to increase again, before the Second World War brought the numbers back down in the first half of the 1940s.
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What caused the recovery from the British Great Depression? A leading explanation - the “expectations channel” - suggests that a shift in expected inflation lowered real interest rates and stimulated consumption and investment. However, few studies have measured, or tested the economic consequences of, inflation expectations. In this paper, we collect high-frequency information from primary and secondary sources to measure expected inflation in the United Kingdom between the wars. A VAR model suggests that inflation expectations were an important source of the early stages of economic recovery in interwar Britain.
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Temporal changes in erectile function and mental health status at baseline and three months after COVID-19 recovery (N = 141).
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IntroductionReduced motivation is an important symptom of major depression, thought to impair recovery by reducing opportunities for rewarding experiences. We characterized motivation for monetary outcomes in depressed outpatients (N = 39, 22 female) and controls (N = 22, 11 female) in terms of their effectiveness in seeking rewards and avoiding losses. We assessed motivational function during learning of associations between stimuli and actions, as well as when learning was complete. We compared the activity within neural circuits underpinning these behaviors between depressed patients and controls.MethodsWe used a Go/No-Go task that assessed subjects’ abilities in learning to emit or withhold actions to obtain monetary rewards or avoid losses. We derived motivation-relevant parameters of behavior (learning rate, Pavlovian bias, and motivational influence of gains and losses). After learning, participants performed the task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We compared neural activation during anticipation of action emission vs. action inhibition, and for actions performed to obtain rewards compared to actions that avoid losses.ResultsDepressed patients showed a similar Pavlovian bias to controls and were equivalent in terms of withholding action to gain rewards and emitting action to avoid losses, behaviors that conflict with well-described Pavlovian tendencies to approach rewards and avoid losses. Patients were not impaired in overall performance or learning and showed no abnormal neural responses, for example in bilateral midbrain or striatum. We conclude that basic mechanisms subserving motivated learning are thus intact in moderate depression.ImplicationsTherapeutically, the intact mechanisms identified here suggest that learning-based interventions may be particularly effective in encouraging recovery. Etiologically, our results suggest that the severe motivational deficits clinically observed in depression are likely to have complex origins, possibly related to an impairment in the representation of future states necessary for long-term planning.
The inter-war period was a phase of political and economic instability in Albania's history. Prior to the introduction of the Albanian Lek* in 1926, Albania did not have its own currency; the Ottoman piastre was in full circulation before the First World War, and it was then replaced by the gold Franc in the 1920s. In the inter-war period, the value of Albanian imports and exports had generally been on the rise until the Wall Street Crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression. This saw the value of Albania's imports and exports fall greatly over the next five years, to less than a third of their 1929 level. There was some recovery in the late 1930s, before Italy's annexation of the region in 1939 at the beginning of the Second World War.
Data becomes available again after the Second World War, and is shown in Albanian Lek. From here until the mid-1960s, Albania became a satellite state and dependency of the Soviet Union (as tensions rose with neighboring Yugoslavia), although relations frayed in the wake of Stalin's death in 1953. At the end of the 1950s, Albania played a surprisingly large role in the Sino-Soviet split; as both sides attempted to curry favor with as many communist countries as possible. Albania eventually split with the Soviets in 1961 and sided with Mao Zedong's China; this transition is one explanation for the trends shown in the final years of the data.
Throughout the 1920s, prices on the U.S. stock exchange rose exponentially, however, by the end of the decade, uncontrolled growth and a stock market propped up by speculation and borrowed money proved unsustainable, resulting in the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. This set a chain of events in motion that led to economic collapse - banks demanded repayment of debts, the property market crashed, and people stopped spending as unemployment rose. Within a year the country was in the midst of an economic depression, and the economy continued on a downward trend until late-1932.
It was during this time where Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was elected president, and he assumed office in March 1933 - through a series of economic reforms and New Deal policies, the economy began to recover. Stock prices fluctuated at more sustainable levels over the next decades, and developments were in line with overall economic development, rather than the uncontrolled growth seen in the 1920s. Overall, it took over 25 years for the Dow Jones value to reach its pre-Crash peak.
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IntroductionPreviously established categories for the classification of disease courses of unipolar depressive disorder (relapse, remission, recovery, recurrence) are helpful, but insufficient in describing the naturalistic disease courses over time. The intention of the present study was to identify frequent disease courses of depression by means of a cluster analysis.MethodsFor the longitudinal cluster analysis, 555 datasets of patients who participated in the INDDEP (INpatient and Day clinic treatment of DEPression) study, were used. The present study uses data of patients with at least moderate depressive symptoms (major depression) over a follow-up period of 1 year after their in-patient or day-care treatments using the LIFE (Longitudinal Interval Follow-Up Evaluation)-interview. Eight German psychosomatic hospitals participated in this naturalistic observational study.ResultsConsidering only the Calinski–Harabatz index, a 2-cluster solution gives the best statistical results. In combination with other indices and clinical interpretations, the 5-cluster solution seems to be the most interesting. The cluster sizes are large enough and numerically balanced. The KML-cluster analyses revealed five well interpretable disease course clusters over the follow-up period: “sustained treatment response” (N = 202, 36.4% of the patients), “recurrence” (N = 80, 14.4%), “persisting relapse” (N = 115, 20.7%), “temporary relapse” (N = 95, 17.1%), and remission (N = 63, 11.4%).ConclusionThe disease courses of many patients diagnosed with a unipolar depression do not match with the historically developed categories such as relapse, remission, and recovery. Given this context, the introduction of disease course trajectories seems helpful. These findings may promote the implementation of new therapy options, adapted to the disease courses.
The Great Depression of the early twentieth century is widely considered the most devastating economic downturn that the developed world has ever seen. Industrial output was severely affected across Europe, and in Germany alone, it fell to just 58 percent of its pre-Depression level by 1932. Other Central European countries, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia, also saw their output fall to just sixty percent of their pre-Depression levels, while output in Western and Northern Europe declined by much less. By 1937/8, almost a decade after the Wall Street Crash, most of these countries saw their industrial output increase above its pre-Depression level. Germany saw its output increase to 132 percent of its 1928 output, as it emerged as Europe's strongest economy shortly before the beginning of the Second World War.