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Great Depression

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Abstract

The world depression of the 1930s was the greatest peacetime economic catastrophe in history. There had been hard times before, but never without war, natural disaster or pestilence. The massive and long-lasting unemployment and hardship of the 1930s was a pathology of industrial society, caused by a malfunctioning of the economic system. Adherence to gold-standard policies led to a set of currency crises in 1931 that turned a bad recession into the Great Depression.

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Temin, P. (2018). Great Depression. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2267

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