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BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME: Emergency Currency of the Great Depression The worst and longest economic downturn in modern times: the Great Depression. This is a pay warrant, issued by the municipal government of Charleston, South Carolina, USA—a sort of government script designed to work around the dearth of circulating currency. From October 29, 1929 until the beginning of the Second World War, the industrialized world suffered through one of the longest and deepest econom ic downturns in its history. The Great Depression was a perfect storm of speculative busts, bank failures, widespread deflation, mass unem ploym ent, and overall financial hardship that lasted for alm ost exactly a decade. Only the econom ic stimulus caused by war, which found jobs for the unem ployed in factories or on battlefields, turned the tide. The Great Depression began in the United States, on Wall Street in New York City. After a decade in which the stock m arket swelled to unforeseen heights, propelled by a variety of factors including real estate speculation in Florida, the bubble suddenly and em phatically burst. On October 24, 1929, and again five days later, the stock m arket experienced an epic collapse. Som e $ 30 billion was wiped away virtually overnight. “Black Tuesday” had widespread ripple effects. There were runs on banks, as terrified investors sought to withdraw their m oney. Loans were called in. The panic worsened as banks began to fail. With fewer banks, businesses had fewer options to take out loans. Com panies went out of business, workers were laid off. Within six m onths, the unem ploym ent rate in the United States had doubled. President Herbert Hoover, a proponent of the theory that governm ent intervention in finance is uniform ly m alefic, gave speeches extolling the health of the economy, but little else. The protectionist Sm oot-Hawley Act, which im posed tariffs on foreign im ports, backfired spectacularly, and exacerbated the econom ic downturn in Europe and elsewhere. The Great Depression thus spread from the United States to the rest of the world. The underlying causes of the crisis rem ain a subject of debate. Som e hold with the fam ed econom ist J ohn Maynard Keynes, who at the tim e decreed that only deficit spending by the federal governm ent to artificially sim ulate growth would fix the economy; indeed, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt im plem ented those policies, the econom y did show signs of recovery. Others argue that the econom y would have recovered on its own, were it not for mism anagem ent by the Federal Reserve Bank. Probably a combination of factors, including the world’s reliance on the increasingly-obsolete gold standard, caused the Depression to endure. Whatever the reason, the pain was widespread and deep. During the Great Depression, the global gross dom estic product fell by a staggering 15 percent. Half the banks in the United States failed. Unem ploym ent soared to record levels. Municipalities were so strapped for cash that they issued pay warrants—quasi-currency that could be used in local markets, and traded in at various tim es of the year for cash. In Europe, an econom y that had been sluggish since the Great War continued to underperform . The woeful financial condition in Germ any specifically led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regim e. Ironically, Hitler would have som e hand in the world’s recovery from global econom ic collapse. As the Allied countries, and Great Britain especially, m obilized for war after the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, there was a surge in both the m anufacturing and m ilitary sectors, which created em ploym ent, which helped end the Great Depression. Th e No te : So u th Caro lin a D e p re s s io n Era, p ay w arran t, $ 1 | D e p re s s io n Scrip # SC10 0 -1 Ord e r co d e : GRTD EPRESSION BN CARD Issued by the city of Charleston, South Carolina to pay municipal employees at the height of the Depression, these pay warran ts could be exchanged for goods at local shops; m erchants would turn them in at set tim es during the year for cash. The pay warrants ranged from one dollar to ten dollars and accrued interest at an annual rate of four or five percent. | Dim ensions: 20 9 x 75 mm .