John Steinbeck once commented that the decade of the 1930s in America read like a script. It had three defined structural parts: a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning came suddenly and unexpectedly with the crash of the stock market in October, 1929.
So what was the Great Depression, and what did FDR do about it? The short answer is that the Great Depression was a rare political opportunity, and Roosevelt made the most of it, to the nation's lasting benefit?
Can government policies that increase the monopoly power of firms and the militancy of unions increase output? This paper studies this question in a dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal frictions and shows that these policies are expansionary when certain “emergency” conditions apply.
The New Deal was an amalgam of dozens of programs and agencies created by the Roosevelt Administration and the Congress.
Some came into being by law, some by executive order; some are well known, some are not; some changed names or were amended in mid-course; some lasted only a few years, some still exist. It can be confusing, and we hope that this list can help sort things out. The list of programs is as complete as you will find anywhere.
The New Deal Roosevelt had promised the American people began to take shape immediately after his inauguration in March 1933. Based on the assumption that the power of the federal government was needed to get the country out of the depression, the first days of Roosevelt's administration saw the passage of banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, and agricultural programs.
The New Deal was a series of economic relief and reform initiatives intended to help the American people and businesses recover from the Great Depression.
The New Deal during the 1930s was arguably the largest peace-time expansion in federal government activity in American history. Until recently there had been very little quantitative testing of the microeconomic impact of the wide variety of New Deal programs.