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The Great Depression is remembered for the devastation it brought to the Ameri- can people. Joblessness, homelessness and debt plagued the country, but even when hundreds of banks closed, Americans found a way to continue commerce with local currencies called "scrip."
The closing of American banks was both an early effect of the Great Depression and a factor that grossly exacerbated it in the early 1930s. Between December 1930 and the "banking holiday" that President Roosevelt declared in March 1933 - which shut down the entire national banking sys- tem - about half of the banks in America either closed or merged with others.
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