When did the great depression start?
Believe it or not, the ground work for the Great Depression was laid in 1919, with the signing of the treaty of Versailles to end world war one. The Reparations and the War Guilt Clause In the treaty, Article 231 of the Treaty (the ‘war guilt’ clause) held Germany solely responsible for all ‘loss and damage’ suffered by the Allies during the war and provided the basis for reparations. The total sum due was decided by an Inter-Allied Reparations Commission and was set at £6.6 Billion. This would have taken Germany till 1984 to pay. The economic problems that the payments brought not only caused the collapse of the Weimar Republic, allowed Adolf Hitler to come to power and set the stage for another world war, but also had a ripple effect to the rest of the industrialized world. So the Allies could whoop it up for a decade or so on War profits, but ultimately, since the global economy was already very interedependent by 1900, Germany’s depression became a global depression. In the US, thi
