What is Economic Collapse?

An economic collapse is a devastating breakdown of a national, regional, or territorial economy. It is essentially a severe economic depression characterised by a sharp increase in bankruptcy and unemployment. A full or near-full economic collapse is often quickly followed by months, years, or even decades of economic depression, social chaos, and civil unrest. Such crises have both been seen to afflict capitalist market economies and state controlled economies. However, in either case the causes and cures are quite different. The economic forecasting community is of two minds on the likely outcome of the financial crisis that erupted in 2007. Some commentators consider it to herald an international economic collapse while the majority, including governments and international organisations, predict a sluggish economy or a recessionary trend.

Cases of economic collapse
There are not many cases of economic collapse in modern history and in most cases the economies made a slow but eventual recovery. Interestingly, the advent of crisis has been traced to imbalances in the financial systems which broke down and paralyzed the real economy. Only after purging out bad debts and driving asset prices to lows, with employment levels and wages severely reduced, have the economies begun a painful and long standing process of recovery.

The Great Depression of the 1930s
The decade of the 1930s witnessed the most traumatic economic collapse since the start of the Industrial Revolution. In the USA, the Depression began in the summer of 1929, soon followed by the stock market crash of October 1929. American stock prices continued to decline in fits and starts until they hit bottom in July 1932. In the first quarter of 1933, the banking system broke down: asset prices had collapsed, bank lending had largely ceased, a quarter of the American work force was unemployed, and real GDP per capita in 1933 was 29% below its 1929 value.[1] The ensuing rapid recovery was interrupted by a major recession in 1937-38. The USA fully recovered by 1941, the eve of its entry in World War II, which gave rise to a boom as dramatic as the Depression that preceded it.