Awful. It wasn't just an American depression, it was a world depression. Europe was still devastated from the first World War and easy credit in the United States led the economy down the toilet. Much of the world also was tied to the US, economically speaking, they went down with them. Also, with the US in the Depression, tariffs were raised against other countries, who responded by doing the same thing. This hurt world trade and caused, in part, a global depression. The lingering depression was one of the many reasons for the rise of dictators in the 1930s (eg Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Mussolini).