Why Did the Great Depression Happen?
What if you had been in New York in 1929? Your neighbor gets rich on stocks, everyone piles in on margin — putting down 10% and borrowing the other 90% — the frenzy where even a shoeshine boy gives stock tips, then the Black Thursday crash and the Great Depression. You choose at every step and experience, as a story, why and how a bubble built on debt collapsed.
What is this content?
'Why Did the Great Depression Happen?' is a choice-driven story where you become a junior reporter at a 1929 New York newspaper, assigned to cover 'the market that never falls,' and decide at every step through the people you meet.
You meet a widow who put her husband's insurance money on margin, a salesman pushing margin loans, an economist who declared 'stocks have reached a permanently high plateau,' and a farmer left destitute because his corn won't sell. Following their dialogue, 'why a bubble built on debt collapsed' clicks into place without any jargon.
Five steps: margin → overheating → the permanent plateau → imbalance → collapse
① Margin: with just a tenth of the money you can buy ten times as much stock. Great on the way up — but a drop of even half wipes out your principal and leaves only debt. ② Overheating: a price well over twice what the company actually earns swells on nothing but the belief that 'it rises, so buy.'
③ The permanent plateau: even the nation's foremost economist insists 'stocks will never come down again' — authority legitimizing the bubble. ④ Imbalance: the city revels while the countryside, buried in overproduction and rock-bottom prices, goes hungry; prosperity pooled with a few. ⑤ Collapse: Black Thursday, October 1929 — selling begets selling, margins fall short and force liquidation, and prices cave in. Bank runs erase even the savings of people who never bought a share, and it spreads into the Great Depression.
The crash was only the trigger
The core message is that the Great Depression wasn't caused by a single day's crash, but by an economy already cracked with debt (margin), belief (the bubble), and imbalance — which the crash toppled all at once. Through a reporter's eyes you follow both the personal tragedy and the structural causes.
Whatever you write — a warning about the bubble or a cheer for the rally — history converges on the collapse. The characters and lines are based on the real Great Depression (the margin frenzy, the economist's 'permanently high plateau,' the 1929 crash, the bank runs), dramatized for learning and fun.