describe the problems that helped start the great depression and how hoover struggled with this depression.?

Question

this is for a history project that is worth 100 points so i need all the help i could get

Answer 1

It came down to over production. Too much was getting produced, food and merchandise, for the economy to consume. So factories had to close and workers had to be fired. It started with the collapse of a bank in Austria, it provoked a panic that reached the US in the form of Black Tuesday (?) in October 1929 when the stock market crashed. That put people on a bad psychological track, they cut back buying even more because of "blind unreasoning fear" as Franklin Roosevelt called it. The agricultural revolution made agriculture far more productive than it had ever been before, so workers were not needed in that field (ha ha), and the mechanical revolution made millions of factory workers superfluous too. They all lost their jobs and once they did they could not afford to buy what those who did have jobs continued to produce, and they lost their jobs too. It snowballed. Hoover tried to cope with it in 2 contrasting ways. One, he actually did try to promote some public works to employ people. But at the same time he misunderstood the depression, he wanted to cut government expenditures because tax receipts had dropped, and that meant cutting the amount of demand in the economy, further curtailing employment. Notably, he refused to fund the Veterans Bonus, payments owed to WW1 veterans that the veterans desired to be paid early so they could afford to eat, to not lose their homes, etc. Had he allowed that benefit to be paid the money those veterans would have spent would have gone a long way toward keeping people employed. Ultimately it took John Maynard Keynes' economic policies to resolve the Depression and its underlying causes. It needs to be stressed that the Great Depression was only one of several depressions. It was the worst, but by no means the only one. There were similar collapses in the 1890's and the 1870's. Keynsian economics has allowed government the ability to moderate, but not totally eliminate, those cyclical economic collapses.

Answer 2

http://hoover.archives.gov/exhibits/Hooverstory/gallery06/gallery06.html