The Great Depression
World output collapses for a decade and takes democracies down with it.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 9.2 years
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
The Wall Street crash of October 1929 is followed by bank failures, monetary contraction and a collapse in trade worsened by tariff retaliation. Unemployment reaches a quarter of the workforce in the United States and Germany. It discredits the prevailing economic orthodoxy, produces Keynes's General Theory and the New Deal, and in Germany it is the proximate condition for the Nazi vote. Economic catastrophe and political catastrophe are directly connected here.