Great Depression

The Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of October, 1929 and rapidly spread worldwide. The market crash marked the beginning of a... decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement. Although its causes are still uncertain and controversial, the net effect was a sudden and general loss of confidence in the economic future. The usual explanations include numerous factors, especially high consumer debt, ill-regulated markets that permitted overoptimistic loans by banks and investors, the lack of high-growth new industries, all interacting to create a downward economic spiral of reduced spending, falling confidence, and lowered production. Industries that suffered the most included construction, agriculture as dust-bowl conditions persisted in the agricultural heartland, shipping, mining, and logging as well as durable goods like automobiles and appliances that could be postponed. The economy reached bottom in the winter of 1932–33; then came four years of very rapid growth until 1937, when the Recession of 1937 brought back 1934 levels of unemployment.
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The Emu War, also known as the Great Emu War, was a nuisance wildlife management operation undertaken in Australia over the latter part of 1932 to... address public concern over the number of emus said to be running amok in the Campion district of Western Australia. The attempts to curb the population of emus, a large flightless bird indigenous to Australia, employed soldiers armed with machine guns — leading the media to adopt the name "Emu War" when referring to the incident. Following World War I, large numbers of ex-soldiers from Australia, along with a number of British veterans, took up farming within Western Australia, often in marginal areas. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, these farmers were encouraged to increase their wheat crops, with the government promising — and failing to deliver — assistance in the form of subsidies. In spite of the recommendations and the promised subsidies, wheat prices continued to fall, and by October 1932 matters were becoming intense, with the farmers preparing to harvest the season's crop while simultaneously threatening to refuse to load the wheat.
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The Great Depression which followed the US stock market crash of 1929 badly affected the countries of Latin America. Before the global Great... Depression of the 1930s, links between the United States economy and Latin American economies had been established through US investment in Latin America and Latin American exports to the US. As a result, Latin Americans felt heavy reverberations when the US market crashed in 1929. Chile, Peru, and Bolivia were, according to a League of Nations report, the countries worst-hit by the Great Depression. The rise of fascism also became apparent in Latin American countries in the 1930s due to the Great Depression. In particular, Getúlio Vargas of Brazil was a staunch supporter of the fascist movement and imitated the Italian government. Fascist governments were the result of a desire for nationalism, which rulers like Vargas played on through propaganda. The Great Depression also led to the beginning of the industrialization process in Brazil, as the country needed an economic alternative to the highly devalued coffee, Brazil's main commodity at the time.
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The Great Depression affected France from about 1931 through the remainder of the decade. The depression had drastic effects on the local economy,... which can partly explain the 6 February 1934 crisis and even more the formation of the Popular Front, led by SFIO socialist leader Léon Blum, who won the election of 1936. Like the United Kingdom, France had initially struggled to recover from the devastation of World War I, trying without much success to recover war reparations from Germany. Unlike Britain, though, France had a more self-sufficient economy. In 1929, France seemed an island of prosperity, for three reasons. First, it was a country traditionally wary of trusts and big companies. The economy of France was above all founded in small and medium-sized businesses not financed by shares. Unlike the Anglosphere and particularly Americans, the French invested little on the stock exchange and put their confidence into gold, which in the crisis of 1929 was a currency of refuge. Gold had played the same role in the first world war, which explained French attachment to it.
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