What Really Caused the Great Depression?

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Mr. Beat examines what really caused the Great Depression. Odds are, your interpretation of the true causes of the Great Depression are strongly influenced by your already strongly held beliefs.

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Sources referenced:
Econclips: The Great Depression | What Caused It?
   • 📽 The Great Depression Documentary | ...  
Crash Course: The Great Depression: Crash Course US History #33
   • The Great Depression: Crash Course US...  
Reading Through History: History Brief: The Causes of the Great Depression
   • History Brief: The Causes of the Grea...  

Additional sources used/further reading:
https://www.britannica.com/story/caus...
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/f...
https://fee.org/articles/what-caused-...
Eichengreen, Barry. "Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses—and Misuses of History." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
https://www.socialstudies.org/system/...
https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/fi...
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publicatio...
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/...

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After scouring as many different sources as possible over the years, I have compiled one giant list of 18 possible causes of the Great Depression, and here they are:

Lack of economic diversity
Unequal wealth distribution
Unstable banking system
Bank panics
Too much credit in 1920s
Not enough credit in 1930s
Money supply was too high in 1920s
Money supply was too low in the 1930s
Federal Reserve raising interest rates at wrong time
The gold standard holding back economy
Decreased international lending
Increased tariffs (Smoot-Hawley Tariff)
Lack of consumer confidence
Trying to balance the budget
Asset bubbles
Drought conditions
Overproduction of goods
Government intervention with labor

While all of those causes are correct to a certain degree, some are less credible than others. Plus, some of these can be combined and are definitely related. And I do get that this list might be overwhelming. And so I’ve come up with a TOP FIVE LIST.

5. An unstable banking system

4. Asset bubbles

3. Increasing tariffs and other taxes when people were struggling

2. Too much money supply in the 1920s, too little in the 1930s

1. Too much credit in the 1920s and too little credit in the 1930s