FDR's first fireside chat: the banking crisis

The first 5 minutes of of a 13 min 42 sec speech delivered on March 12, 1933. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, one in four Americans was out of work nationally, but in some cities and some industries unemployment was well over 50 percent. Equally troubling were the bank panics. Between 1929 and 1931, 4,000 banks closed for good; by 1933 the number rose to more than 9,000, with $2.5 billion in lost deposits.