SM2 : Honors History Writing : 1

Dear President Obama,
I am writing you to discuss some of the current troubles we are facing economically today. Our troubles have many similarities with some of the troubles that were faced during the 1930’s in the great depression. There are a few a main points I would like to talk about, what lead up to “the great depression”, what lead up to what some call “the great Recession”, FDR’s way of fixing the depression, and some ideas as to how we can fix our current recession
There were 5 major causes for the great depression, one of the top being the crash of the stock market October 29, 1929. The stock market crash occurred on Black Tuesday, October 29. Two months after the crash stockholders lost more than $40 billion dollars. The market began to regain some of the 40 billion dollars but it was not enough leaving American in what we call the great depression.
Another huge one was the Bank failures throughout the time period over 9,000 banks failed. Bank deposits were uninsured and people began to lose their money the Surviving banks, however stopped creating new loans.
As they fell deeper into the crisis businesses began to fail drastically. People started to cut back on spending their money on pointless items .This charged a high tax for imports leading to less trade between America and other foreign countries.
When people lost their jobs, they were unable to keep up with paying for things previously bought and many of their items were repossessed. A lot of inventory started to accumulate. This raised the unemployment rate above 25% which lead to even, less spending which worsen the economic situation.
A lot of the same things are reoccurring in today’s recession. In usually, the rate of jobless people remains steady every month. But lately there has been a constant, steep rise in that number with over 10 percent of people unemployed
Before the recession hit the economy was booming there were new inventions and lots of money being spent helping our economy grow rapidly Since the economy was booming mortgage brokers enticed big commissions, and talked buyers with poor credit into leasing houses with mortgages with little or no down payment, they also didn’t have proper tax documentation and credit checks This all back fired when people when the interstate went up 2 percent people didn’t have enough money to pay back loans which lead to a lot of foreclosed houses .
The New Deal was basically a series of economic programs that FDR got passed by Congress during his first term. The new deal included the works in progress administration, the national Recovery act administration, and the social security act
The main problem that seems to show up is the unemployment rate; if people don’t have jobs then they do not have money, there for they cannot buy things such as foreign trades, new technology and other items that would benefit the flow of our economy. If people are not buying products such as computers or vacuums etc then the companies that are selling the computers and vacuums must cut back on their staff making fewer jobs then there already has been
If we create more jobs that can benefit the government, our economy and the earth would be a way to help us out of the recession, example cleaning trash from high ways, streets, and drains this is something that benefits the government and our earth but still helps give jobs to bring our economy back up to float.

I hope you will get ideas and inspiration from my ideas above, it is important to use history as a tool to move forward.

Sincerely ,
Jasmine Jackson