ABSTRACT
Germany faced an impending bankruptcy at that time which was entirely unrelated to the events in America. The German government was under political pressure to cut taxes, but on the other hand it could no longer place long term government bonds and thus depended on short term credit. In this context the lowering of the discount rate after the crash was very welcome to the government. In subsequent years Germany faced a crisis of a special kind which will be analysed in the respective section of this chapter. At this stage these statements may suffice to show that the crash of 1929 did not mark the beginning of the depression in Europe. The mechanism of the transmission of the depression was much more complex. Europe was affected only after a considerable
time lag. In order to reconstruct the process of transmission we shall present four case studies: Great Britain, Germany, France and Sweden, the latter so as to illustrate a very special instance of successful crisis management.
