The Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933 opened with a declaration that the economic depression created a serious emergency, due to wide-spread unemployment and the inadequacy of State and local relief funds, resulting in the existing or threatened deprivation of a considerable number of families and individuals of the necessities of life, and making it imperative that the Federal Government cooperate more effectively with the several States and Territories and the District of Columbia in furnishing relief to their needy and distressed people.[69] Here then was an emergency created by the inadequacy of previous effort to cope with abnormal threats to the well-being of the population. The Municipal Bankruptcy Act of May 24, 1934 also described the emergency in terms which related it to the inability of local government units to function properly. Congress declared a national emergency existed, caused by the increasing financial difficulties of many local governmental units, which rendered imperative “the further exercise of the bankruptcy powers of the Congress.”[70] On the same day that he signed the Emergency Relief Act, the President also signed an Act describing another facet of the emergency. The latter Act stated “the present acute economic emergency” was in part the result of very low prices for farm products. The effect of declining income for the American farmer had virtually destroyed his purchasing power, thus undermining the agricultural assets supporting the national credit structure.[71] The causal phenomena for declarations of emergency were, according to the statutes, heavy and unwarranted withdrawals of gold, severe drains on the Nation’s stocks of gold, widespread unemployment, and a severe and increasing disparity between the prices of agricultural and other commodities. Efforts to meet the emergency situation were directed immediately to ameliorate the existing emergency conditions and ultimately so alter the causal phenomena as to eliminate the causes of the existing threat to national well-being. The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 made passing reference to “the existing emergency.”[72] The President in January 1936 proclaimed that this emergency had not been terminated but, on the contrary, had been intensified in different ways by unsettled conditions in international commerce and finance and in foreign exchange.[73] As late as 1941 Congress continued certain of the powers delegated in the Gold Reserve Act until June 1943 “unless the President shall sooner declare the existing emergency ended.”[74] In 1953 Congress authorized the President to declare the existence of economic disaster in any area. Thereafter the Secretary of Agriculture, on finding that an economic disaster had created a need for agricultural credit that could not be met for a temporary period from commercial banks or other responsible sources, might authorize emergency loans to farmers.[75]