The global economic cycle is its own living, breathing entity, expanding and contracting with imprecise balances involving supply and demand. Expansions and contractions, also known as booms and busts, support a delicate balance between checks and balances, employment and unemployment. The year 1929 marked the beginning of the downward spiral of that delicate economic balance known as the Great Depression of the United States of America. The Great Depression was by far the most significant economic event to occur during the 20th century, making other depressions pale in comparison. As a result, this has plunged the world's political and economic systems into a complete loss of credibility. What turns an ordinary recession or business cycle into a full-blown depression is a controversial topic that has caused concern among economic theorists. Some claim that the depression was the result of an extraordinary succession of errors in the monetary procedure. Historians point to structural factors such as massive bank failures and the stock market crash; Economists blame monetary factors such as the Federal Reserve's actions in reducing currency allocations and Britain's attempt to return its gold standard to pre-World War I parities. Subsequently, there are theorists like the monetarists, who assume that it started as a normal recession, but that numerous policy errors made by the monetary establishment forced a reduction in the money supply, which worsened the economic situation, thus transforming the normal recession into a normal recession. Great Depression. Others speculate that it was a failure of the free market or a failure of government in its efforts to regulate interest rates, slow down the occ...... middle of paper.. .... Ronald W. "Pre-Keynesian Monetary Theories of the Great Depression: What Happened to Hawtrey and Cassel? (1991): "Crisis Economics: Policies: Lessons from the Great Depression, 1929." Economics of Crisis. http://www.nomicsofcrisis.com/economys_of_crisis/depression.html (accessed June 26, 2010). Economics and Liberty. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html (accessed June 26, 2010). Greenspan, Alan “321gold: Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan 1966.” ...Welcome! http://www.321gold.com/fed/greenspan/1966.html (accessed June 26, 2010). ://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/Slouch_Crash14.html (accessed June 26, 2010).