The 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression: How It Unfolded

The 1929 stock market crash came in two October days — Black Thursday, October 24 and Black Tuesday, October 29 — at the end of a decade in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average had multiplied nearly six times over. I walk the timeline from the August 1921 low near 64, through the September 3, 1929 peak at 381.17, Roger Babson’s warning, Irving Fisher’s “permanently high plateau,” and the margin borrowing that turned falling prices into forced selling. Then the crash week itself: a record 12.9 million shares on Black Thursday, the bankers’ pool at J.P. Morgan and Company, and the 16.4 million-share collapse of Black Tuesday. I also cover the part the popular story usually gets wrong — October 1929 was not the bottom, and the Dow did not close at 41.22 until July 1932, roughly 89% below its peak. The video closes with the competing scholarly explanations for the Great Depression, the myth that everyone owned stocks, and the reforms that rewrote American finance.

Chapters
0:00 – The Morning of October 24, 1929
0:27 – The Boom: A New Era on Wall Street
0:54 – The Peak, Babson’s Warning, and Fisher’s Plateau
1:39 – Buying on Margin: The Machine That Feeds Itself
2:35 – Black Thursday and Black Tuesday
4:33 – Not the Bottom: The Long Slide to 1932
5:05 – Did the Crash Cause the Great Depression?
5:56 – Reform, Reckoning, and the Lesson of 1929

*Disclosure: This is not financial advice and should not be taken as such. The information contained in this video is an opinion. Some of the information could be wrong. This channel is owned and operated by Portfolio Constructs LLC.