Josh.
You are the one who claims consumer confidence was “high” in 1929.
But you provide not a whit of proof.
A five second search on google turns on this gem fromBrittainica.com.
The fundamental cause of the Great Depression in the United States was a decline in spending (sometimes referred to as aggregate demand), which led to a decline in production as manufacturers and merchandisers noticed an unintended rise in inventories.
Your memory is amazingly short.
I already admitted I was wrong, remember?! I do that. You almost never do (and claim to never be wrong).
LOL!
It was Zero! No one was buying anything!
Wages were low.
Did you get past fifth grade?
I'm wrong.
So are you.
During the summer of 1929, the country entered a mild recession, while the stock market continued to climb, hitting a peak in August.
I provided a quote from one history book which indicated that wages continued to rise. I gave another that talked about how Hoover was highly popular and
nobody saw a reason that his presidency should not be successful.
You suggested that if I took 5th grade history I would know that nobody was buying anything. You haven't found any textbooks to support your position. I've found one high school textbook that does and two that don't, which is a long way from every 5th (or 10th) grade kid's knowing it.
You found an encyclopedia article. Oh boy. Except that even yours doesn't support your contention that "
No one was buying anything!"
Consumer confidence was not high. I already granted that. But it also wasn't zero. And national confidence in Hoover was still high through the summer, until late August.
The economy started to shrink in August, months before the stock market crash in October. ... The economic activity from the Roaring Twenties reached its peak. After that, it started to contract. It was the true start of the Great Depression.
The Balance
or
The events of Black Thursday are normally defined to be the start of the stock market crash of 1929-1932, but the series of events leading to the crash started before that date. This article examines the causes of the 1929 stock market crash. While no consensus exists about its precise causes, the article will critique some arguments and support a preferred set of conclusions. It argues that one of the primary causes was the attempt by important people and the media to stop market speculators. A second probable cause was the great expansion of investment trusts, public utility holding companies, and the amount of margin buying, all of which fueled the purchase of public utility stocks, and drove up their prices. Public utilities, utility holding companies, and investment trusts were all highly levered using large amounts of debt and preferred stock. These factors seem to have set the stage for the triggering event. This sector was vulnerable to the arrival of bad news regarding utility regulation. In October 1929, the bad news arrived and utility stocks fell dramatically. After the utilities decreased in price, margin buyers had to sell and there was then panic selling of all stocks.
~Harold Bierman, Jr., Cornell University, on the Economic History Association's website
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-1929-stock-market-crash/or
What Caused the Great Depression
1. Stock Market Crash of 1929 and bank failures destroyed most of America's liquid income and savings.
2. Americans stopped spending money. This accentuated the problem.
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from American History: Observations & Assessments from Early Settlement to Today
In other words, the people stopped spending money
after the crash, not before it.
You will never admit a mistake, but in this case you made two of them.
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