Economic History & Events

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic downturn in the 1930s, with mass unemployment and collapsing output and prices.

The Great Recession was the deep global downturn of 2007–2009 triggered by a housing and financial crisis.

The gold standard was a monetary system in which a currency's value was fixed to and convertible into a specific amount of gold.

Bretton Woods was the post-WWII system of fixed exchange rates pegged to the U.S. dollar, which was convertible to gold.

Hyperinflation is extremely rapid, out-of-control inflation, often exceeding 50% per month.

The New Deal was a set of U.S. government programs in the 1930s aimed at relief, recovery, and reform during the Great Depression.

An economic bubble is when an asset's price rises far above its fundamental value, driven by speculation, before crashing.

A soft landing is when a central bank slows the economy enough to curb inflation without causing a recession.

Stagflation of the 1970s was the combination of high inflation and high unemployment that broke the simple Phillips curve trade-off.

An oil price shock is a sudden, large jump in crude oil prices that raises costs across the economy and shifts short-run aggregate supply left.

The dot-com bubble was the surge in internet company share prices during the late 1990s, followed by a crash when the promised profits never came.

The subprime mortgage crisis was the wave of American home loan defaults that, amplified by securitization and bank leverage, set off a global financial panic.

Weimar hyperinflation was the collapse of the German mark in the early 1920s, when the government printed money to cover deficits and prices doubled in days.

Japan's lost decade was the long stagnation after its asset bubble burst, when debt-heavy firms repaid loans instead of investing and interest rates hit zero.

The Marshall Plan was American aid to Western Europe after the Second World War, supplying the dollars needed to buy imported fuel, food and machinery.

The Industrial Revolution was the shift to machine and factory production that first made growth in output per person continuous rather than temporary.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was an American law of the early 1930s that raised import duties, provoked retaliation abroad and helped shrink world trade.

The Volcker disinflation was the Federal Reserve's early-1980s campaign that broke double-digit inflation by accepting a deep recession to gain credibility.