Stock prices began to say no in September and early October 1929, and on October 18 the autumn began. Panic set in, and on United Nations Day , Black Thursday, a record 12,894,650 shares were traded.

Investment companies and leading bankers attempted to stabilize the market by buying up great blocks of stock, producing a moderate rally on Friday.

On Monday, however, the storm broke anew, and therefore the market went into free fall. Black Monday was followed by Black Tuesday (October 29, 1929), during which stock prices collapsed completely and 16,410,030 shares were traded on the ny stock market during a single day.

Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery couldn’t handle the tremendous volume of trading.

Causes of the Crash in 1929:

The crash of 1929 didn’t occur during a vacuum, nor did it cause the good Depression. Rather, it had been a tipping point where the underlying weaknesses within the economy, specifically within the nation’s banking industry , came to the fore. It also represented both the top of an era characterized by blind faith in American exceptionalism and thus the beginning of 1 during which citizens began increasingly to question some long-held American values. variety of things played a task in bringing the stock exchange to the present point and contributed to the downward trend within the market, which continued well into the 1930s. additionally to the Federal Reserve’s questionable policies and misguided banking practices, three primary reasons for the collapse of the stock exchange were international economic woes, poor income distribution, and therefore the psychology of public confidence.

After war I, both America’s allies and therefore the defeated nations of Germany and Austria contended with disastrous economies. The Allies owed large amounts of cash to U.S. banks, which had advanced them money during the war effort. Unable to repay these debts, the Allies looked to reparations from Germany and Austria to assist . The economies of these countries, however, were struggling badly, and that they couldn’t pay their reparations, despite the loans that the U.S. provided to help with their payments. The U.S. government refused to forgive these loans, and American banks were within the position of extending additional private loans to foreign governments, who used them to repay their debts to the U.S. government, essentially shifting their obligations to non-public banks. When other countries began to default this second wave of personal bank loans, still more strain was placed on U.S. banks, which soon sought to liquidate these loans at the primary sign of a stock exchange crisis.

Poor income distribution among Americans compounded the matter . a robust stock exchange relies on today’s buyers becoming tomorrow’s sellers, and thus it should have an influx of latest buyers. within the 1920s, this wasn’t the case. Eighty percent of yank families had virtually no savings, and only one-half to 1 percent of usa citizens controlled over a 3rd of the wealth. This scenario meant that there have been no new buyers coming into the marketplace, and nowhere for sellers to unload their stock because the speculation came to an in depth . additionally , the overwhelming majority of usa citizens with limited savings lost their accounts as local banks closed, and likewise lost their jobs as investment in business and industry came to a screeching halt.

Finally, one among the foremost important factors within the crash was the contagion effect of panic. For much of the 1920s, the general public felt confident that prosperity would continue forever, and therefore, during a self-fulfilling cycle, the market continued to grow. But once the panic began, it spread quickly and with an equivalent cyclical results; people were worried that the market was taking place , they sold their stock, and therefore the market continued to drop. This was partly thanks to Americans’ inability to weather market volatility, given the limited cash surpluses that they had available , also as their psychological concern that economic recovery might never happen.