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1、 1) General introduction about the Great Depression. (Definition/Background Introduction) 2) The cause and the development of the Great Depression. How do all the nations deal with the Great Depression. 3) The political, economic, and the social influence of the Great Depression on the world nations
2、.The Great DepressionThe Great Depression was an economic slump in North America, Europe, and other industrialized areas of the world that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world.Though the U.S. eco
3、nomy had gone into depression six months earlier, the Great Depression may be said to have begun with a catastrophic collapse of stock-market prices on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. (During the next three years stock prices in the United States continued to fall, until by late 1932 th
4、ey had dropped to only about 20 percent of their value in 1929 )Besides ruining many thousands of individual investors,(个人投资者) this precipitous decline in the value of assets greatly strained banks and other financial institutions, particularly those holding stocks in their portfolios. Many banks we
5、re consequently forced into insolvency（破产）; （by 1933, 11,000 of the United States 25,000 banks had failed） The failure of so many banks, combined with a general and nationwide loss of confidence in the economy, led to much-reduced levels of spending and demand and hence of production, thus aggravati
6、ng the downward spiral. The result was drastically falling output and drastically rising unemployment; (by 1932, U.S. manufacturing output had fallen to 54 percent of its 1929 level, and unemployment had risen to between 12 and 15 million workers, or 25-30 percent of the work force.)The Great Depres
7、sion began in the United States but quickly turned into a worldwide economic slump owing to the special and intimate relationships that had been forged between the United States and European economies after World War I.The United States had emerged from the war as the major creditor and financier of
8、 postwar Europe, whose national economies had been greatly weakened by the war itself, by war debts, and, in the case of Germany and other defeated nations, by the need to pay war reparations. So once the American economy slumped and the flow of American investment credits to Europe dried up, prospe
9、rity tended to collapse there as well. The Depression hit hardest those nations that were most deeply indebted to the United States, i.e., Germany and Great Britain. In Germany, unemployment rose sharply beginning in late 1929, and by early 1932 it had reached 6 million workers, or 25 percent of the
10、 work force. Britain was less severely affected, but its industrial and export sectors remained seriously depressed until World War II. Many other countries had been affected by the slump by 1931.Almost all nations sought to protect their domestic production by imposing tariffs, raising existing one
11、s, and setting quotas on foreign imports. The effect of these restrictive measures was to greatly reduce the volume of international trade（ by 1932 the total value of world trade had fallen by more than half as country after country took measures against the importation of foreign goods.）The Great D
12、epression had important consequences in the political sphere. In the United States, economic distress led to the election of the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in late 1932. Roosevelt introduced a number of major changes in the structure of the American economy, using increased gov
13、ernment regulation and massive public-works projects to promote a recovery. But despite this active intervention, mass unemployment and economic stagnation continued, though on a somewhat reduced scale, with about 15 percent of the work force still unemployed in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II.
14、 After that, unemployment dropped rapidly as American factories were flooded with orders from overseas for armaments and munitions. The depression ended completely soon after the United States entry into World War II in 1941. In Europe, the Great Depression strengthened extremist forces and lowered
15、the prestige of liberal democracy. In Germany, economic distress directly contributed to Adolf Hitlers rise to power in 1933. The Nazis public-works projects and their rapid expansion of munitions production ended the Depression there by 1936.At least in part, the Great Depression was caused by unde
16、rlying weaknesses and imbalances within the U.S. economy that had been obscured by the boom psychology and speculative euphoria of the 1920s. The Depression exposed those weaknesses, as it did the inability of the nations political and financial institutions to cope with the vicious downward economic cycle that had set in by 1930. Prior to the Great Depression, governments traditionally took little or no action in times of
