Wall Street Crash

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout. The crash signaled the beginning of the 10-year Great Depression that affected all Western industrialized countries and that did not end in the United States until the onset of American mobilization for World War II at the end of 1941.

The crash followed a speculative boom that had taken hold in the late 1920s, which had led hundreds of thousands of Americans to invest heavily in the stock market. A significant number of them were borrowing money to buy more stocks. By August 1929, brokers were routinely lending small investors more than two-thirds of the face value of the stocks they were buying. Over $8.5 billion was out on loan, more than the entire amount of currency circulating in the U.S. at the time. On October 24, 1929, with the Dow just past its September 3 peak of 381.17, the market finally turned down, and panic selling started.

The stock market crash and the Great Depression formed "the biggest financial crisis of the 20th century”. “The panic of October 1929 has come to serve as a symbol of the economic contraction that gripped the world during the next decade."