I did not pay much attention in social studies classes in middle school, but one topic that always comes to mind is The Great Depression. I don’t remember what my teacher taught me about The Great Depression so I feel like this is a great opportunity to research about it and commit to this topic. I have two questions about The Great Depression. Question one, what are the root causes of The Great Depression? Question two, What were the intermediate and long term consequences of The Great Depression? I discovered trading in late July of 2022, ever since then I’ve been obsessed with the NYSE, studied the movements of America’s three most traded indices, the S&P 500, Dow Jones, and the Nasdaq, just overall super interested in the financial side of the world. Learning about the causes of The Great Depression can help us avoid another black swan event like this, understanding the consequences of The Great Depression will teach young people money saving skills, budgeting skills, and lastly risk management because during The Great Depression, people lost their life savings, people lost money because of risky investments, and people lost their jobs. Saving money and not recklessly spending your money will save you when a tragic event like this occurs again. I expect to find the main causes of The Great Depression, the reason why the stock market crashed, and the consequences civilians faced. From what I researched so far, the stock market crash in 1929 happened because in the 1920s many people were getting interested in investing their money into the stock market, people were pouring their entire life savings into stocks and some even borrowed money from the bank to do so, which lead stocks to hit a price point that has never been reached before and as stock starts to decline, people and banks lost a lot of money, this really just shows people without any risk management and then when the The Great Depression struck, people had no money to keep themselves alive. This is something I can relate to myself because I’ve lost thousands of dollars trying to make money from stocks, mainly because of poor risk management.
