Quote from jueco2005:
What was the % lost from Oct 1929 to Oct 1930???
You think 44% is bad??? Try 90% from peak to trough. Thats how bad it was then. Look it up theres a ton of interesting info. Here are some facts courtesy of wikepedia.
Effects of depression in the United States:
-13 million people became unemployed. In 1932, 34 million people belonged to families with no regular full-time wage earner.
-Industrial production fell by nearly 45% between the years 1929 and 1932.
-Homebuilding dropped by 80% between the years 1929 and 1932.
-In the 1920s, the banking system in the U.S. was about $50 billion, which was about 50% of GDP.
-From the years 1929 to 1932, about 5,000 banks went out of business.
-By 1933, 11,000 of the US' 25,000 banks had failed.
-Between 1929 and 1933, U.S. GDP fell around 30%, the stock market lost almost 90% of its value.
-In 1929, the unemployment rate averaged 3%.
-In 1933, 25% of all workers and 37% of all nonfarm workers were unemployed.
-In Cleveland, Ohio, the unemployment rate was 60%; in Toledo, Ohio, 80%.
-One Soviet trading corporation in New York averaged 350 applications a day from Americans seeking jobs in the Soviet Union.
-Over one million families lost their farms between 1930 and 1934.
-Corporate profits had dropped from $10 billion three years ago to $1billion in 1932.
-Between 1929 and 1932 the income of the average American family was reduced by 40%.
-Nine million savings accounts had been wiped out between 1930 and 1933.
-273,000 families had been evicted from their homes in 1932.
-There were two million homeless people migrating around the country.
-One Arkansas man walked 900 miles looking for work.
-Over 60% of Americans were categorized as poor by the federal government in 1933.
-In the last prosperous year (1929), there were 279,678 immigrants recorded, but in 1933 only 23,068 came to the U.S.
-In the early 1930s, more people emigrated from the United States than immigrated to it.
-The U.S. government sponsored a Mexican Repatriation program which was intended to encourage people to voluntarily move to
-Mexico, but thousands were deported against their will.
-Altogether about 400,000 Mexicans were repatriated.
-New York social workers reported that 25% of all schoolchildren were malnourished. In the mining counties of West Virginia,
-Illinois, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, the proportion of malnourished children was perhaps as high as 90%.
-Many people became ill with diseases such as tuberculosis (TB).
-The 1930 U.S. Census determined the U.S. population to be 122,775,046. About 40% of the population was under 20 years.