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Economic Depressions
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The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 following an era marked by financial panics and economic depressions. Its principal goal then was economic stability. This goal is still important today, along with current objectives such as stable prices, high employment, and economic growth. In addition to working toward these aims through its conduct of monetary policy, the Federal Reserve is a bank for banks, a bank for the U.S. government, and a supervisor and regulator of banks.
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Both the Economic and the Financial Committees interpreted the mandate as consisting in two wholly distinct parts, one concerned with the present depression and the second regarding the broader problem of the recurrence of economic depressions. The former problem was tackled first: the League organized three meetings with representatives of various 'conjuncture institutes', on the basis of memoranda submitted by the latter. The result of the discussions was presented in a Report presented to the Assembly by Bertil Ohlin: The Course and Phases of the World Economic Depression, published by the League in 1931.
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Some economists who've studied economic depressions believe the clearest causes of depressions are too little business competition, especially when government itself contributes to such reductions. Also, when governments prop up inefficient businesses rather than letting them fail, that too can help bring on depression.
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At the end of the Reconstruction, the spread of science and technology, industrialism, urbanization, immigration, and economic depressions eroded Americans' conventional beliefs in individualism and a divinely ordained social system. In The Search for Order, Robert Wiebe shows how, in subsequent years, during theProgressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Americans sought the organizing principles around which a new viable social order could be constructed in the modern world. This subtle and sophisticated study combines the virtues of historical narrative, sociological analysis, and social criticism.
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The Great Depression followed almost a decade of spectacular economic growth. Between 1921 and 1929, output per worker grew about 5.9 percent per year, roughly double the average in the twentieth century. Unemployment and inflation were both very low throughout this period as well. One troublesome characteristic of the 1920s... was that income distribution became significantly less equal. Also, a boom in housing construction, associated in part with an automobile-induced rush to the suburbs, collapsed in the late 1920s. And automakers themselves worried throughout the late 1920s that they had saturated their market fighting for market share; auto sales began to slide in the spring of 1929.
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If this theory were true, crime and terrorism would rise during economic depressions and fall during boom times. Crime should ... be higher in places where poverty is worst, and least where living standards are highest. In fact, the opposite tends to hold.
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Economic Depressions