Decreased international lending and tariffs. In the late 1920s, while the U.S. economy was still expanding, lending by U.S. banks to foreign countries fell, partly because of relatively high U.S. interest rates. The drop-off contributed to contractionary effects in some borrower countries, particularly Germany, Argentina, and Brazil, whose economies entered a downturn even before the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States. Meanwhile, American agricultural interests, suffering because of overproduction and increased competition from European and other agricultural producers, lobbied Congress for passage of new tariffs on agricultural imports. Congress eventually adopted broad legislation, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930), that imposed steep tariffs (averaging 20 percent) on a wide range of agricultural and industrial products. The legislation naturally provoked retaliatory measures by several other countries, the cumulative effect of which was declining output in several countries and a reduction in global trade.
The gold standard. Whatever its effects on the money supply in the United States, the gold standard unquestionably played a role in the spread of the Great Depression from the United States to other countries. As the United States experienced declining output and deflation, it tended to run a trade surplus with other countries because Americans were buying fewer imported goods, while American exports were relatively cheap. Such imbalances gave rise to significant foreign gold outflows to the United States, which in turn threatened to devalue the currencies of the countries whose gold reserves had been depleted. Accordingly, foreign central banks attempted to counteract the trade imbalance by raising their interest rates, which had the effect of reducing output and prices and increasing unemployment in their countries. The resulting international economic decline, especially in Europe, was nearly as bad as that in the United States
Banking panics and monetary contraction. Between 1930 and 1932 the United States experienced four extended banking panics, during which large numbers of bank customers, fearful of their bank’s solvency, simultaneously attempted to withdraw their deposits in cash. Ironically, the frequent effect of a banking panic is to bring about the very crisis that panicked customers aim to protect themselves against: even financially healthy banks can be ruined by a large panic. By 1933 one-fifth of the banks in existence in 1930 had failed, leading the new Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to declare a four-day “bank holiday” (later extended by three days), during which all of the country’s banks remained closed until they could prove their solvency to government inspectors. The natural consequence of widespread bank failures was to decrease consumer spending and business investment, because there were fewer banks to lend money. There was also less money to lend, partly because people were hoarding it in the form of cash. According to some scholars, that problem was exacerbated by the Federal Reserve, which raised interest rates (further depressing lending) and deliberately reduced the money supply in the belief that doing so was necessary to maintain the gold standard (see below), by which the U.S. and many other countries had tied the value of their currencies to a fixed amount of gold. The reduced money supply in turn reduced prices, which further discouraged lending and investment (because people feared that future wages and profits would not be sufficient to cover loan payments).
