Black Tuesday
The Dow fell 11.7 percent in a single session, following an 12.8 percent drop on Black Monday the day before. 16.4 million shares changed hands on the NYSE, a record that stood for 39 years. Ticker tape ran hours behind real prices because the equipment physically could not keep up with volume. Investors were buying and selling blind, executing orders at prices that were already stale. The Dow peak of 381 set six weeks earlier would not be recovered until 1954. The bottom, at 41 in July 1932, was still almost three years away.
Will Rogers wrote the next day: 'When Wall Street took that tail spin, you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of, and speculators were selling space for bodies in the East River.' The suicide rate, while actually lower than in previous years, became the defining image of the crash.
04 · The Great Depression
The Dow peaked at 381 in September 1929. It bottomed at 41 in July 1932 — a decline of 89% over 34 months. Recovery to the 1929 peak took until 1954. Margin lending wiped out the middle class. Unemployment reached 25%. One in four US banks failed. The New Deal, modern securities law, the FDIC, and most of the 20th century's economic institutions exist because of this crash.
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