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  • Policies: Lessons from the Great Depression, 1929
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Policies: Lessons from the Great Depression, 1929

 Timeline: Great Depression

September 3, 1929            The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits its highest point before the crash.

October 18, 1929               The stock market begins to sharply fall and continues through the end of the month.

November 13, 1929           The stock market hits its low point.

March 1930                         Unemployment doubles from the previous year before the crash.

June 17, 1930                      Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which raises import duties, is signed into law by President Herbert Hoover.

April 20, 1931                      Construction on Hoover Dam begins in a public works initiative.

January 22, 1932                The Reconstruction Finance Corporation is created.

February 27, 1932              First Glass-Steagall Act passed to stop deflation.

March 4, 1933                     Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated as president.

March 5, 1933                     FDR declares “banking holiday.”

March 9, 1933                     Congress passes the Emergency Banking Act of 1933.  Part of this involves taking the US off the Gold Standard. 

April 5, 1933                        FDR creates Civilian Conservation Corps to increase employment.

May 12, 1933                      Agricultural Adjustment Act enacted.

May 18, 1933                      The Tennessee Valley Authority is created.

May 22, 1933                      The Federal Emergency Relief Administration is created.

June 16, 1933                      National Recovery Act passed.

June 16, 1933                      Congress passes second Glass Steagall Act to create the FDIC and separate commercial from investment banking.

August 19, 1933                 Public Works Administration created to increase employment

June 1, 1934                        Federal Communications Commission created.

June 6, 1934                        FDR passes Securities Act of 1934 to establish the Securities and Exchange Commission.

June 12, 1934                      Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act passed.

May 6, 1935                         Works Progress Administration enacted.

July 5, 1935                          Wagner Act enacted.

August 14, 1935                 FDR signs into law the Social Security Act of 1935.

August 30, 1935                 Revenue Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937

November 3, 1936             FDR reelected in a landslide.

March 1937                         Unemployment rises again. 

April 1938                             Congress passes a $3.75 billion fiscal stimulus package. 

June 25, 1938                      Fair Labor Standards Act

November 5, 1940             FDR is the first president reelected for a third term in office.  

December 7, 1941             Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, and war production stimulates the US economy.

November 23, 1954           The Dow Jones Industrial Average returns to its pre-crash high.

Additional Sources on the Economics of the Great Depression:

PBS timeline of the Great Depression: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rails/timeline/index.html. 

1.       Beaudreau, Bernard C.  2005.  How the Republicans Caused the Stock Market Crash of 1929.  Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse Publishing.

2.       Bernanke, Ben S.  1995.  The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression: A Comparative Approach.  Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 27(1):  1-28.

3.       Bernanke, Ben S. 2002.  Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke At the Conference to Honor Milton Friedman, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.  On Milton Friedman's Ninetieth Birthday.  November 8.

4.       Bernanke, Ben S. and Kevin Carey.  1996.  Nominal Wage Stickiness and Aggregate Supply in the Great Depression.  Quarterly Journal of Economics 111(3): 853-83.

5.       Bordo, Michae D., Christopher J. Erceg, Charles L. Evans. 2000.  Money, Sticky Wages, and the Great Depression.  The American Economic Review 90(5): 1447-1463/

6.       Britannica Online.  2010.  New Deal. Retrieved January 8, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/eb/article-9055453.

7.       Calomiris, Charles and Joseph R. Mason, 2003. “Fundamentals, Panics, and Bank Distress During the Depression”, American Economic Review 93.

8.       Cogley, Timothy.  1999.  FRBSF Economic Letter 99-10.  Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco online.  March 26.

9.       Cole, H., and L. Ohanian. (2000). New Deal policies and the persistence of the Great Depression: A general equilibrium analysis. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Discussion Paper.

10.   Barry Eichengreen.  1996.  Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939.  New York: Oxford University Press.

11.   Eichengreen, Barry, and Jeffrey Sachs.  1985. Exchange Rates and Economic Recovery in the 1930s, Journal of Economic History 45: 925-946.

12.   Eichengreen, Barry and Peter Temin.  1997.   The Gold Standard and the Great Depression.  NBER Working Paper No. W 6060.

13.   Fisher, Irving.  1933.  The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions  Econometrica

1: 337-357.

14.   Fisher, Irving. (1934). "Are Booms and Depressions Transmitted Internationally Through Monetary Standards?" 2nd printing with additions and corrections. New Haven, CT: Irving Fisher.

15.   Friedman, Milton and Schwartz, Anna J. A monetary history of the United States, 1867- 1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.

16.   John Kenneth Galbraith.  1955. The Great Crash of 1929.  New York: Mariner Books.  An excellent account of the stock market bubble and the Great Depression

17.   Gay, Edwin F.  1932.  The Great Depression.  Foreign Affairs, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Jul., 1932), pp. 529-540.

18.   Hannsgen, Greg and Dimitri B. Papadimitriou.  2009.  Lessons from the New Deal: Did the New Deal Prolong or Worsen the Great Depression?  Levy Institute Working Paper No. 481.

19.   Keynes, John Maynard.  1936.  The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

20.   Kindleberger, Charles P.  1951.  Bretton Woods Reappraised.  International Organization 5(1): 32-47

21.   Kindleberger, Charles P.  1986.  The World in Depression, 1929-1939.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

22.   Krugman, Paul.  2007.  Is This the Wile E. Coyote Moment?  New York Times blog, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/is-this-the-wile-e-coyote-moment/

23.   NPR.org.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113875201

24.   PBS.org.  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rails/timeline/index.html.

25.   Pehle, John W.  1946.  The Bretton Woods Institutions.  The Yale Law Journal 55(5): 1127-1139.

26.   Powell, Jim.  2003. FDR’s Folly.  New York: Three Rivers Press.  One attack on FDR's policies can be found in Jim Powell's FDR's Folly.

27.   Rappoport, Peter and Eugene N. White.  1994.  Was the Crash of 1929 Expected?  The American Economic Review 84(1): 271-281.

28.   Robinson, Bruce.  2009.  World War Two: Summary Outline of Key Events.  BBC Online.  November 5.

29.   Sprinkel, Beryl Wayne.  1952.  Economic Consequences of the Operations of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.  The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago 25(4): 211-224

30.   Steinbeck, John.  1939.  The Grapes of Wrath.  New York: Viking Books.

31.   Taylor, Jason E. 2002.  The Output Effects of Government Sponsored Cartels During the New Deal.  The Journal of Industrial Economics 50(1): 1-10.

32.   P. Temin, Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? New York 1976.

33.   Temin (1989) .  Temin, Peter. (1989). Lessons from the Great Depression. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

34.   Wicker, Elmus. "A Reconsideration of the Causes of the Banking Panic of 1930." Jour-nal of Economic History, September 1980, 40(3), pp. 571-83.

35.   Wicker. The banking panics of the Great Depression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.