How Britain avoided the worst of the Great Depression

For Britain, the Great Depression really wasn’t especially great, or particularly depressing. John Stepek explains why.

For the last month or so, I've been talking about the Great Depression the run up to it, the unfolding of the Crash of 1929, and the aftermath.

But clearly, it's mostly been US-focused. And maybe you're wondering, what was going on in Britain at this time? How come we don't really have the same folk memory of the Great Depression?

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.