Unemployment in the United States Unemployment is something that has been problematic in the United States for over a hundred years. Throughout the last century the United States has seen Unemployment rates that have been high as well as rates that have been low. During the past two or three weeks I have been researching the topic beginning with October 29th, 1929, the start of the great depression, all the way until modern day. It has been an interesting few weeks and I’m excited to analyze everything that I have discovered. The Great Depression is considered to be the largest and longest lasting crash that the American economy has taken to date. The Great Depression really began during the summer of 1929. That summer American consumer spending began to fall, and this caused unsold product to gather. While this was occurring the prices of stock kept rising, and by October of 1929 the stock prices were unreasonably high. October 24th is known as black Thursday; on this day nearly 13 million shares were trades which scared the people of Wall Street. October 29th 1929 fell on a Tuesday that year. This was the day that the great depression truly started. Almost 16 million shares were traded on this day. It created a panic on Wall Street and soon after millions of investors lost all of their money. The loss of money in circulation caused consumer spending to drop, and this caused the supply of products to drop. Many companies went out of business, and those who didn’t lay off many of their workers. The great depression peaked around 1933. At this time there were around 15 million Americans that were out of work, and almost fifty percent of America’s banks had failed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first person to really help the great depression. He announced a bank holiday which lasted four days. During those four days congress passed reform legislation and