Ummm... yeah exactly pretty much what I said on the other topic posted about the "Bail-Out"
The depression was caused by buying "on margin". Just like credit card companies can give you a credit- card not knowing if you have any means to pay the debt back. That's why there tightening up on just handing out credit cards in the last several months, they knew this was about to happen.
So picture this will ya>>>>> say a 100,000 people use their credit cards to buy gas and milk, that's it. They each ring up say a couple thousand dollars in debt.... they can't pay back their debt due to hard times and job cuts high prices and the fact inflation had definatly caught up to us. So 200 million dollars that never gets paid back, that's on a extremly small scale too you could easily multiply that buy ten. Now we can talk about the housing market and forcloseures on homes. Who do you think pays for all this?? Our government, we are screwing ourselves.
In the 20's you could "buy on margin" with Wall-Street... esencially credit in stocks... people would buy stocks with credit. Can you imagine?? Sounds dumb as hell right? But it happend.
What's happening now is in some way the same thing everyone has credit cards it's becoming harder to pay the debt down and people are just forfeiting their debt.