Causes of the Great Depression Outline

Prompt: To what extent was the Wall Street Crash a cause of the Great Depression of 1929? Support your argument with specific examples.



Example of the outline structure:



Thesis
I. Main Point 1
a. Evidence 1 that supports Main Point 1
i. further supporting details
b. Evidence 2 that supports Main Point 1
II. Main Point 2.... and so on.

Thesis: The Wall Street Crash was a significant cause of the Great Depression because it was a big cycle, when the stocks went down, it affected other businesses and people, but there were other factors that caused the great depression because there was numerous factors that caused the Wall Street Crash like stock market speculation and the mass production of farming products.
I. Stock Market Speculation
Stock Market Speculation was a cause of the Great Depression because people were buying stocks with money they did not have, the money they paid the stocks for was money that was an estimate on how much they would get off of that particular stock over a period of time.
The speculation was one of the factors that lead up to the Wall Street Crash because stocks were being bought without ever being paid for. They were paid off of estimates that the stock would make money and the stock brokers would be paid back with that money, but when the stocks did not go up, the stock brokers were never paid and it created problems in Wall Street.
II. Mass production of farming products
a. Wheat is an example of a farming product that was made way to much of. Most ffarmers bought expensive equipment and bought more land to make more crops, but after WWI there wasn't as high as a demand for farming products than there was during the war, so the farmers had more crops than they knew what to do with, and the cost of the products went down because so much of it was being produced.
i. When the farmers were making too much, they could not sell all of it, nobody would buy a lot of it because it became so cheap because there was so much of it that not all of it was needed, and most of the farmers were in debt, which led to the Great Depression.
III. Easy access to credit
a. People began to get credit, which seemed like a good idea at first but it did not work out after awhile. People were spending money that they didn't have, they put everything on credit and then once it was time to pay they did not have the money to pay it with.
i. This caused Wall Street to crash because everybody was in debt, they were using money that they did not have and once it was time to pay that money they used, it was not there, which caused Wall Street to Crash, which lead to the Great Depression of 1929.