What were the causes and consequences of the Wall Street Crash?

On the causes of the Depression, candidates write about its consequences instead - unemployment, bank failures, Hoovervilles - describing what happened afterwards rather than what caused the Crash. A causes answer needs speculation, margin buying and overproduction. Before including a point, check it explains why the Crash came, not what followed.

Agricultural causes of the Depression are under-used. American farmers faced foreign competition (Europe recovering after the war) and tariffs that invited retaliation against US exports, on top of chronic overproduction that kept prices low even during the boom. This left much of the economy fragile before October 1929 - use it in a causes answer, not just the stock market.

On 1920s farmers' problems, some wrongly bring in the Dust Bowl or describe the general boom. The Dust Bowl (drought and soil erosion on the Great Plains) is a separate 1930s disaster. The 1920s problems were chronic overproduction, falling prices, foreign competition and tariffs. Keep the two apart - one helped cause the Depression, the other deepened it.

Don't confuse Hoover's response with Roosevelt's New Deal. Hoover favoured limited, voluntary action ('rugged individualism') plus modest measures like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932). Roosevelt promised an active federal 'New Deal' - but its detailed programmes came after he took office in 1933, not during the 1932 campaign.

Answers often claim Hoover did nothing. In fact he took some action - notably the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932), lending to banks and businesses - but it was too limited, too indirect and too late for suffering families, and he resisted direct federal relief. Argue that his response was inadequate to the crisis, not literally non-existent.

A testable error. The Wall Street Crash was the share-price collapse in late October 1929. The Great Depression was the longer collapse - bank failures, closures, mass unemployment, hardship - that followed over years. Treating them as one, or placing Hoovervilles in October 1929, misses the causal chain: the Crash triggered the knock-on collapse that became the Depression.