1.+Banks

listen [|here] 1. Listen to the passage. On a piece of paper, take notes on the main points of the listening passage.

(professor) Today we're going to be talking about the Bank Holiday of 1933. A holiday. A bank holiday. Sounds like a nice thing, doesn't it? But it really wasn't. It occurred when the U.S. banking system was in serious trouble in 1933, but somehow this situation became known as a holiday rather than as a disaster.

Let's talk about what led up to the Bank Holiday of 1933. In the 1920s, banking in the United States hadn't been very stable, and it wasn't unusual for banks to fail. Then, after the stock market crashed in 1929, the problem with banks became much worse. By 1933, more than half the states had closed banks.

The solution to this problem was when President Roosevelt called a bank holiday. This bank holiday meant that all banks were closed for a period of days while the federal government worked to reorganize the banking system. One of the bills passed by the government at the time was federal deposit insurance, which means that any money deposited in U.S. banks would be insured by the federal government.

Since the time of the bank holiday, the situation has improved considerably. The number of banks that fail has decreased sharply, and the number of people to lose money by depositing it in a federally insured account has remained at zero.