《英文随笔》金昔吖

1、美国经济大萧条

　　The Great Depression
　　Introduction:
　　The Great Depression was a severe crisis occurred in the 1930s, triggered by a liquidity shortfall in the United States banking system [1]. This financial crisis first began in American and soon turned into global because of the economic globalization. But the fundamental cause was the inherent contradictions of capitalism—the contradiction between the socialization of production and private possession of means of production. It had a great impact on the western world, resulting in numerous evictions, foreclosures, and prolonged vacancies.
　　After recovering from the crisis, the American government realized the failure of the invisible hand and the loopholes of the “small government, big market” policy. From then on, the state’s visible hand becomes more powerful in controlling the market. This article is going to discuss the process of the Great Depression, government policy to handle the financial crisis and lessons we should learn from the Great Depression.

　　Discussion:
　　As we all know, we will have a bloom period before going a downhill path. And the Coolidge Prosperity was a period of flourishing time before the Great Depression, served as a blooming period before the downfall.
　　The Coolidge Prosperity, also called the Roaring Twenties, was mainly caused by the First World War, during which time, the United States amassed fabulous wealth. As the neutrality position in the war, America had the opportunity to provide military supplies for both sides, in which way America gained much money and thus expanded the military and industrial production. The United States also lent money to both Britain and France and extended the agricultural production. So during the first world war, American had an unprecedented chance to lay the foundations for the future economy.
　　After the First World War, since the power of Britain declined greatly because of the tremendous consume in the war, the United States made Canada and Latin America the main investment places of its monopoly capital by excluding the capital of European countries with the slogan of \"America is America of Americans\", Dollar Diplomacy and “a big stick\" policy. Broad domestic and international markets, as well as the technological revolution, helped the United States meet the Coolidge Prosperity, a time when the United States had transitioned from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy successfully, booming and providing loans for European, and become the richest country in the world.
　　However, good times didn’t last for long, only several years later, when all the American people were lost in the happiness brought by the capitalism and put their money in the equity market, the Great Depression occurred.
　　On October 24, 1929, the United States ushered in its Black Thursday, on which day the financial sector of the United States collapsed. Only a few days later, on October 29, 1929, everyone in the New York Stock Exchange was caught in a whirlpool of selling stocks. Thousands of Americans watched their life savings dissipating in a few days. Stocks fell from the top to the abyss overnight, and prices fell so fast that the automatic stock market monitor could not even keep up with it. Both two events heralded the coming of the Great Depression.
　　The Great Depression resulted in the collapse of large financial institutions and the bailout of banks by national governments in stock markets around the world. To make matters worse, millions of people in America lost their homes. About 2-4 million middle school students dropped out of school and many people even committed suicide because they could not bear the physical and psychological pain. And social security was deteriorating sharply as well. In the United States, the total number of unemployed people reached 8.3 million, the highest number in American history.
　　Causing by the disorder of the market, the disaster caused by the Great Depression in the United States is unprecedented in human history and is even worse than China\'s so-called \"three-year famine\" from 1959 to 1961 during its three-year difficult period. Great famine and malnutrition occurred all over the United States, resulting in the abnormal death of lots of people. The most conservative estimate is that at least 7 million people died of anxiety, accounting for about 7% of the total number of deaths in the United States at that time.
　　However, apart from blaming the disorder of the market, the government also had a legal, if not a moral duty to defuse the crisis. Herbert Clark Hoover, the American president at that time, did little to help people get through the crisis. As a Republican, he believed that the function of the federal government was to maintain such a balance without allowing any individual or group to enjoy privileges and the economic trauma could only be self-healed by the cells of economic entities. In his mind, the federal government should intervene in the economy at a minimum degree. Even the intervention, if any, should be temporary, which meant that Hoover continued to hold the laissez-faire policy and opposed to the Federal Direct Relief Program. Those policies Hoover took further aggravated the Great Depression.
　　Then another president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came into power. As a Democrat, Roosevelt believed that aggressive government involvement was needed to solve the problem. Opposite to Hoover, he stopped the moratorium on the gold standard by rectifying the banking and financial departments which helped to restore the bank\'s credit gradually so as to depreciate the dollar to stimulate exports. Roosevelt also abandoned the gold standard and depreciated the dollar to stimulate exports. Apart from these policies, he also adjusted the agriculture policy and provided economic subsidies to farmers who had reduced their farming and production, which increased and stabilized the prices of agricultural products. More importantly, Roosevelt promulgated the National Industrial Recovery Act. According to this act, each industrial enterprise should formulate fair management rules for its own industry and determine the production scale, price level, market distribution, wage standard and working hours of each enterprise, in order to prevent overproduction caused by the blind competition, thus strengthening the government\'s control and regulation of capitalist industrial production and easing class contradictions. For the sake of increasing the employment rate, he also constructed many public works which shot two hawks with one arrow—not only did it provided people with works but also set up many public facilities which had a profound and lasting impact on the united states. With the help of Roosevelt’s New Deal, America’s economy bounced back gradually [2].

　　Summary:
　　Although the Great Depression is one of the most severe financial crises in human history, it also takes lessons for the economist and government. From then on, White House learned that government intervention in a competitive market is not always a bad thing and both pure market regulation and government regulation have defects respectively. In order to make the economy develop better, government should act positively and appropriately to ensure the market mechanism goes smoothly.