Explain the importance of the great depression on the american and the world economy? what were three of the major causes of the collapse during the great depression?

The government's reaction was to absorb more political power, dump the gold based currency, and replace it with promissory notes. They then created make work jobs and flooded the market with this currency. Nothing improved until Imperial Japan attacked and Germany declared war on the US. Private factories were re-started and competed with one another for government war contracts. After the war, the depression should have returned, but something was altered: the US was left with the only functioning factories --- unlike the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, US factories were not leveled by bombing. This meant that Americans had a monopoly on manufactured goods, and two countries -- former enemies-- that could be rebuilt and turned into ready markets for American goods. The US walked out of WWII rich, with just a few cyclical recessions that healed themselves. As a result, the government slowly came back into the market to get its cut. The War on Poverty, the slow trend to absorb health care, union greed, and continual addition of hidden tax resources increased the drag on the free-enterprise private sector of the economy. This has made the US non-competitive in a global world market. To remedy the situation, nationalization of the private sector continues under populist socialist pressures, and I suspect that the depression is coming back and the hey-day of US economic power will not return very soon. The public treasury went bust long ago.