Your assignment
Role: Research analyst preparing a museum-quality evidence timeline for accounting and finance learners
Deliverable: A dated seven-lane timeline plus a 1,200-word memo separating chronology, mechanisms, contested causal claims, institutional responses, and omitted evidence.
Evidence basis: public records
Evaluation criteria
- chronology (25%): Aligns output, price, labor, financial, international, and policy dates without false precision.
- mechanism plurality (30%): Explains several plausible interacting mechanisms and preserves evidence limits.
- institution mapping (25%): Connects later institutions to specific diagnosed problems without claiming one complete fix.
- source craft (20%): Attributes claims, distinguishes primary from later synthesis, and writes without hero-villain compression.
Assignment
Create separate lanes for output, prices, labor, banking and credit, international conditions, policy actions, and institutional changes. Every arrow between lanes must be labeled as chronology, proposed mechanism, or supported causal inference.
Include the debt implications of deflation and distinguish the dated U.S. contraction from the broader depression. Map Keynes, the Employment Act, and Bretton Woods as later intellectual or institutional developments, not events that all occurred at the 1929 peak.