
1929: The Great Crash
- Year:
- 2009
- 200 Views
1
In 1929, years of booming prosperity
ended in catastrophe.
It was the biggest stock market
It is impossible to underestimate the
shock, a sense of stunned disbelief.
First-time investors borrowed huge amounts
of money to speculate on the market.
The market broke very sharply, and a
lot of people were wiped out with it.
It was very painful.
Later, thousands of banks failed.
Millions lost everything.
The poverty was really all around
us. It was really, really pitiful.
The Crash was followed by a Depression
lasted for a decade
and was a prelude to war.
This is a story
of a financial disaster
that we hoped
Wednesday 23rd October 1929,
without warning,
share prices are plummeting
on the New York Stock Exchange.
Investors are stunned.
For the last five years,
the market has only gone up.
In the space of an hour, a staggering
The next day,
the downward spiral continues.
As people came in
to trade stocks on October 24th,
there was a sense that
maybe something had changed.
All of a sudden,
there just weren't buyers.
People were willing to sell, but there
weren't buyers coming forth to buy the stocks.
And prices began to fall $2, $4,
$10 a share. It was horrifying.
That morning, there were drops on the Stock
Exchange that were so sharp and so dire,
stock suddenly dropping
10, 20, 30 points at a time,
that it's said that there were
shrieks and gasps in the gallery
of the New York Stock Exchange.
People are stunned
by what is happening, and terrified.
Thousands of people begin to gather
outside the Stock Market.
10,000 people.
They fill the streets
from Broadway to the East River.
People wanting to know what
was going, they went there.
These huge crowds gathered around
the Stock Exchange,
around the statues
and on the stairs,
waiting to get any kind of news they
could as people came out of the exchange.
They could hear the shouting and
yelling as people were buying and selling
but they but they
didn't know what was going on
until they gathered
and they stayed there, to find out.
Few of the thousands waiting in the crowd appreciated
the scale of the disaster that was about to unfold.
over the next five days,
a financial catastrophe would sweep away
the foundations of America's prosperity.
But to understand what brought about
the crash, we need to go back a decade,
to a time when American confidence grew so high
that it seemed the good times would last for ever.
In 1919, the US had emerged
victorious from World War one.
A mood of optimism was in the air.
Britain and its European Allies were
exhausted financially from the War.
But the US economy was thriving and
the world danced to the American tune.
The uncertainties were over.
There seemed little doubt about
what was going to happen.
America was going on the greatest,
gaudiest spree
in history, and there was
going to be plenty to tell about it.
In the 1920s, everyday life
was changing.
Electrification
transformed America.
Towns were hooked up to the grid.
New technologies emerged -
aeroplanes, radios.
Domestic goods that had started life
as luxuries, now became necessities.
The car industry also boomed as people flocked to
buy one of the new Ford or Chrysler automobiles.
An era of boundless prosperity
seemed to have begun.
This is the flowering of consumer culture and
mass consumption on a scale never before seen.
There is also heavy
instalment buying
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"1929: The Great Crash" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2021. Web. 16 Jan. 2021. <https://www.scripts.com/script/1929:_the_great_crash_1587>.