Title: The Big Question: What was Roosevelt's New Deal, and is something like it needed today? | The Independent | The Independent
Headings: The Big Question: What was Roosevelt's New Deal, and is something like it needed today?
The Big Question: What was Roosevelt's New Deal, and is something like it needed today?
Why are we asking this now?
What was the New Deal?
Why was it introduced?
Are there political parallels?
And what about economic parallels?
So we've learnt some lessons from history?
So the US can get by without a New Deal?
What are McCain and Obama saying?
So is this another Great Depression?
Yes...
No...

Content: The current financial and economic turmoil is increasingly likened to the crisis that began with the Wall Street crash of 1929, paving the way to the Great Depression of the 1930s. That slump, the deepest and most prolonged economic downturn of modern times, continued through much of the decade. The response of Franklin Roosevelt, who became President of the United States in March 1933, was the New Deal. But the US economy did not truly recover until the country's entry into the Second World War. What was the New Deal? The New Deal is shorthand for a host of government programmes introduced by Roosevelt between 1933 and 1938. The phrase itself originates in FDR's acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic convention in Chicago, in which he promised "a new deal for the American people". The various measures included support for, and reform of, the collapsing banking industry, a new stock market regulatory agency, moves to boost wages and prices, the creation of massive public works projects and – perhaps most important of all – the launch of Social Security, the American equivalent of National Insurance in the UK. Taken together, they not only constituted a "New Deal" to help ordinary Americans. They also initiated a new era of government activism, in terms of both intervention and regulation of the economy.