In 1929, years of booming prosperity
ended in catastrophe.
It was the biggest stock market crash since records began.
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 that spread across the world,
lasted for a decade and was a prelude to war.
This is a story of a financial disaster
that we hoped would never happen again.
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 2.5 million shares are sold.
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.
Nor could they imagine that, 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
to encourage people to buy big ticket consumer items, so that they can buy those items on credit.
This type of consumer credit was another innovation of the 1920s.
For the first time, the idea of "buy now, pay later" hit the mainstream.
There's a kind of a play culture that develops alongside this consumerism which says,
"We believe now in instant gratification. Take care of the now. Live for the moment. "
It was a whole ideology, that we were in a new economic era,
and it was the birthright of every self-respecting American to be rich.
With easy credit and more disposable income,
Americans were now looking for new ways to get even richer.
Since World War One, the US government had sold bonds, known as Liberty Bonds, to pay for the war.
This was a way to borrow money from the public,
who, in turn, would receive interest payments on the bond's value.
Celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks
had been recruited to promote them at huge rallies.
Liberty bonds caused many people to become investors in securities for the first time.
For the first time in their lives,
they got interest payments every six months,
And the security was something they could trade on the markets,
so they could look in the newspaper and see what the price of my bond is today.
Liberty bonds created an investing culture.
Most people had never purchased securities before
and it got ordinary people accustomed to buying securities.
Now there was another group of people who thought
they could take advantage of this new investing culture -
the bankers of Wall Street.
For years Wall Street, the centre of American finance,
was made up of a small, elite group of bankers
doing business with each other in a society closed off to the general public.
But one man saw an opportunity that would change the face of the financial world.
Charles Mitchell, president of National City Bank, spotted a lucrative gap in the market.
Mitchell saw that investors had purchased a lot of government bonds during World War I,
and so, he said, "Now we have an investing public there,
"all we need to do is market other products like corporate bonds,
"common stocks, and just tell people these are respectable investments. "
Mitchell was a natural salesman with a big ambition.
If people were willing to buy bonds to raise capital for the government,
surely they could be tempted to buy stocks and shares,
to raise capital for private companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange?
And they could make a profit for themselves in the process.
Gradually, people who never dreamed that they would invest in stocks were doing so,
and stocks lost a lot of the stigma.
Historically, stocks had been considered much too risky for ordinary people,
whereas in the 1920s, there was a sense that, investing in stocks was, in fact, not only safe
but reliable and respectable.
The idea took off.
And to exploit this lucrative new market, Mitchell opened brokerage offices all across the country
where people who had the money but not the investment know-how
could speculate in stocks and shares.
This speculative frenzy embraced all kinds of people, not just professionals.
Ordinary people began participating, as well, in unprecedented numbers
all across the country - not just in New York City but in cities and small towns -
all across America people were in love with the Stock Market.
Technology made it all possible.
The latest share prices flashed from Wall Street could be printed out within minutes across America
using telegraphic ticker-tape machines.
You could find ticker tape in night clubs in railroad depots,
in beauty parlours, on ocean liners.
The market became a pervasive part of America's play culture in the 1920s.
I eat sleep, dream, talk stocks,
the only way, I believe, to make money. It's exciting.
I love it
17,000 dollars' profit on 3,500 dollars' capital.
Not bad!
There were wild speculations in all kinds of securities -
movie company stocks, aeronautical stocks, all the auto company stocks.
One of the hot stocks of the 1920s was Radio Corporation of America.
It was a lot like today's Google.
It was cutting-edge technology.
They had this idea that you could put radios in cars - imagine that(!)
The American investing public began to connect the products they were using
that were coming from corporate America
with the notion that, "hey, I might own a share of the company that makes that product that I like. "
By the mid-20s, around 3 million Americans were in the market,
and Wall Street gripped the public imagination. With tales of fortunes being made overnight,
the idea of a great bull market - where shares only seemed to go up - took hold.
Every popular magazine, every newspaper, every radio station
was fascinated by what was going on in the Stock Market.
People charted the activities of celebrities like Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx
and were fascinated by what stocks they happened to be speculating in.
The young comic actor Groucho Marx invested all his savings into the market
and was so pleased with his profits on paper that he persuaded his brothers to invest, too.
What an easy racket.
RCA went up seven points since this morning.
I just made myself 7,000 dollars.
But it wasn't just celebrities becoming speculators.
The big Wall Street speculators were becoming celebrities themselves.
They were thought of as creative, entrepreneurial and bringing wealth to America.
Joseph Kennedy, father of the future President Kennedy,
was one of this new breed of shrewd financial superstar.
People were fascinated because some of these men, like Joseph Kennedy, were ordinary folks.
They were men from nowhere and their rapid rise on the market
was a kind of inspiration to ordinary folk that that might even be possible for them some day.
Stories circulated that anyone from bellboys to barbers could make easy money on the market.
A shoeshine boy on Wall Street, Pat Bologna, was one of those inspired by these tales of rags to riches.
Everyone was going to make a fortune.
If you lived in New York, the Stock Market was king.
My father was probably about 17 or 18.
On a daily basis, he would shine the shoes
of, literally, the great men of America.
People like Joseph Kennedy, executives like Mitchell.
He would converse with them and became somewhat of an expert on things like the Federal Reserve
and things that you wouldn't think that a shoeshine would be expert on.
But he was talking to the great minds of Wall Street every day, all day.
So my father began to invest in the Stock Market.
If the truth be told, I learned how to read reading the stock pages.
Cos that was what my father did. I mean, we grew up with the Stock Market.
There was the Stock Market for breakfast, and for dinner when he came home.
The Stock Market was the world.
I started in 1928 because, like many young people,
I wanted to go to the place where everybody was making all this money.
My first job was to be a messenger boy on the floor of the Exchange.
It took only a week or two to find out that, most of the time, people are greedy.
People had so much faith in the bull market
that they borrowed increasing sums of money to speculate on rising share prices.
This way of buying shares was known as "buying on margin".
The investor was required to put down only part of the money,
with their broker funding the rest.
The culture of "buy now, pay later" had spread to the Stock Market.
Buying stocks on margin means essentially that you're buying them with borrowed money.
By the late 1920s, 90% of the purchase price of the stock is being made with borrowed money.
There were no rules about how much you could borrow,
and people borrowed enormous sums of money to buy stocks.
You could buy $100 stock for $25,
and then the brokerage firm would loan you the other 75.
And if the stock went up - and in the late '20s, everything seemed to go up and up -
then that $25 could turn into an investment worth 200 or 300.
So it became a huge part of the US economy to loan money for the Stock Market.
In fact, in the late 1920s, nearly 40 cents of every dollar loaned was for stocks.
This vast influx of borrowed money into the Stock Market
created more demand for shares, pushing prices ever upwards.
In 1928, the market went up by almost 50% in just 12 months.
And as stocks continued to rise, more and more investors borrowed money to get a piece of the action.
One of them was shoeshine boy Pat Bologna.
My father didn't have a lot of money in the Stock Market.
He told me at the time he had about $6,000 in cash.
But remember, $6,000 in cash translated into a lot of stock
because in those years, you only had to put 10% down for margin.
So at $6,000, you could have $60,000-worth of stock.
Wall Street was hungry for new punters.
There was one group of would-be investors that the Street had always ignored,
but whose money it now wanted.
Up until the 1920s, women had played a very small role on the Stock Market.
Part of this was simply gender prejudice.
They were considered incapable of the kind of cool sangfroid
that was necessary if you speculated in the market. But in the 1920s,
part of the popularisation of the Stock Market included huge numbers of women.
Well, the '20s were a big time for women, anyway.
They really stepped out on their own.
They began to take control of their own money, they went to college in record numbers in the 1920s,
and as they did that, they also got interested in the Stock Market,
and it was a way for them to build their own wealth.
One such investor was a pioneering New York photographer called Alice Austen.
She lived on Staten Island, just across the water from Wall Street.
She had moved into this house when she was a couple of months old.
She was bright, she was adventurous. By the time she was 11,
she had received a camera, which was a new invention by the time.
And she immediately took to it.
Over the years, she took some 8,000 glass-plate negatives,
making her one of America's earliest and most prolific photographers.
Alice's inheritance from her grandfather had funded a comfortable lifestyle,
but it had dwindled by the 1920s, and she was tempted by Wall Street's promise of a quick buck.
Alice Austen discovers that she's running a little low, and the question becomes, "What to do?"
Her friends urged her to be conservative,
cut some spending, maybe not go to Europe, maybe not buy a car.
Instead, Alice found a broker who advised her no, buy stocks, become rich quick, and you know what?
You can borrow money, so you can buy even more stocks, buying on margin.
And Alice Austen thought that, hey, sounds like a good idea to me.
Throughout the soaring market of the 1920s,
the Republican party stayed in power, on the back of America's increasing prosperity.
Calvin Coolidge became President in 1923.
An investor himself, he was notably silent on the speculative mania gripping Wall Street.
Calvin Coolidge typifies the laissez-faire, devil-may-care recklessness of the 1920s.
He was famous for saying that the business of America IS business.
It was a prosperous period. Business was making money. Wall Street was making money.
The politicians, I think, just said, "Well, everything's fine. The economy's growing.
"The market takes care of things, and the government's job is to get out of the way. "
During the Coolidge presidency, Wall Street's power continued to grow unchecked.
His administration had close links with an elite group of bankers and financiers -
Wall Street's inner circle.
Their wealth and connections gave them immense influence over the government's financial policy.
There were small, elite, private partnerships.
This was really the royalty of Wall Street.
These were very mysterious and discreet places.
They were small firms with limited capital,
but they exercised really an outsize power.
The most prestigious of these elite firms was the JP Morgan Bank.
Strategically located directly opposite the Stock Exchange,
it would play a key role in events to come.
As senior partner at JP Morgan, Thomas Lamont was the most powerful man on Wall Street.
His influence extended well beyond New York.
Lamont and the other JP Morgan partners spoke regularly with successive Presidents.
Grandfather was a very, very busy man.
He didn't have time, as some grandfathers might do,
to take his grandson to the baseball game
or go fishing, and do things like that.
Grandfather's lifestyle was certainly a very handsome lifestyle. There's no question about it.
He did have his yacht, the Reynard, which was a 72-foot, very handsome yacht,
which he often would cruise down from his house in Palisades,
commuting by boat, if you will, down to Hudson River to Wall Street, and then walk up to the bank.
Under Lamont's leadership, JP Morgan steered clear of the worst excesses of the Stock Market.
But the close relationship between elite bankers and politicians
helped keep government regulation of Wall Street to a minimum.
While amateur speculators were transfixed by the soaring value of their investments,
they were hopelessly unaware of how Wall Street really worked.
With little government supervision,
the market was a law unto itself, and insider-dealing was rife.
There was a lot of market manipulation going on. It was rampant.
There was no disclosure at all. When Wall Street was very small and very self-contained,
that was OK, but as people like you and me put our hard-earned money into the market, then it really mattered.
The stock market of the 1920s was neither fair nor democratic.
It was a big gambling casino and it was rigged by professional speculators.
As smaller investors gambled with their life savings,
they failed to realise that the odds were stacked against them.
Men like Joseph Kennedy did not make their fortunes by simply picking the right stocks.
The truth was that they were cashing in on the naivety of gullible newcomers.
A bunch of sharp speculators would get together
and in a co-ordinated fashion, they would start quietly but relentlessly buying an individual's stock.
What they would do is hype up the particular stock, buy it up themselves,
then dump it on the market so that THEY took the profits
while the average investor in those stocks were left with the losings.
Even some of the elite investment houses on Wall Street
were engaged in this type of market manipulation.
In March of 1929, a new Republican President, Herbert Hoover, was inaugurated.
In his address, he reassured Americans.
We have reached a higher degree of comfort and security
than ever existed before in the history of the world.
But behind the scenes, he was less confident.
Hoover is actually sceptical about what's going on on Wall Street, and the economy, generally.
But he doesn't have the political courage of his convictions,
and so, when he becomes President,
he does nothing to rein in this wild, speculative fervour.
He doesn't do anything to encourage the Federal Reserve or the Treasury
to tighten up margin speculation in the Stock Market.
In private, Hoover talked of an "orgy of speculation",
but, like his predecessor Coolidge, he had no appetite for regulation of the marketplace.
Yet Hoover was not alone in his fears that the Stock Market bubble might be about to burst.
Days after the inauguration speech, a prominent and highly respected banker - Paul Warburg -
broke ranks with the Wall Street aristocracy, and issued a bleak warning.
If orgies of unrestrained speculation are permitted to spread too far,
the ultimate collapse is certain to bring about a general depression involving the entire country.
My great-grandfather issued a warning in March of 1929. He actually used the word...
a "depression". And he was shouted down.
I think he was disregarded. He was, you know,
a party pooper. I mean, "No, no! Everything's fine. "
Everybody's making money and having a good time at the party.
So, when there is a good bull market, the person who says,
"This might be getting over-valued,
"you'd better be careful", he's dismissed.
Warburg's prediction fell on deaf ears,
and between May and September 1929,
60 new companies were floated on the New York Stock Exchange,
adding more than 100 million shares to the marketplace,
fuelling the investment bubble.
You hear the same things in every bubble -
this time is different, it's a different financial world, it's a new financial world.
In fact, Groucho Marx went to his broker at some point and said,
"I just don't understand how these prices just keep going up", and the broker said,
"You just have to understand that it's a global economy now. "
This was 1928, 1929! Gee, I think I've heard that some time since then!
Some professional speculators sensed that the market was overheating.
The more astute got out during the summer.
One day, apparently, Joe Kennedy, according to later recollections, he said,
"If the shoeshine guy knows as much as I do about the Stock Market,
"maybe it's time for me to get out. "
In September, the market became increasingly volatile.
Behind closed doors, President Hoover's unease was growing.
Herbert Hoover did keep making enquiries among his Wall Street friends,
asking if he should be concerned, and he received a memo
from Thomas W Lamont, who was the senior partner of JP Morgan & Co.
Grandfather said in that letter that the market will correct itself
and there would not appear to be any need for any kind of government intervention in the market.
Lamont reassured Hoover that there was absolutely no cause for concern
and the memo ended with the line, "The future appears brilliant. "
Five days later, the Stock Market crashed.
No-one knows what triggered the sudden loss of confidence
that happened at the end of Wednesday 23rd October.
But out of nowhere, a sharp fall in automobile stocks provoked a frantic last hour's trading.
Millions of shares were suddenly sold.
The next day, the Great Crash of 1929 began.
October 24th 1929, Black Thursday, is often considered to be the beginning of the Crash.
There was really a tremendous drop, which scared a lot of people.
It's impossible to underestimate the shock.
A sense of stunned disbelief. People panic as the market just drops and drops and drops.
Desperate for news, thousands gathered outside the Stock Exchange.
Tremendous crowds standing there very grimly, staring ahead. Men who had just been wiped out.
City officials are so alarmed by this that they send 400 mounted police,
fearing that there's going to be a kind of Bastille-like invasion of the Stock Exchange.
And it's said that there was a strange murmur in the air,
that there was a very, very strange kind of haunting sound,
which must have been the cumulative voices of all of these people sharing their concerns.
The popular reaction is one of, "This can't be happening. "
A visitor from Britain was there that day, too.
Winston Churchill had invested much of his own money in the US Stock Market
and had decided to pay a visit.
I happened to be walking down Wall Street at the worst moment of the panic,
and a perfect stranger, who recognised me,
invited me to enter the gallery of the Stock Exchange.
I expected to see pandemonium, but the spectacle that met my eyes
was one of surprising calm and orderliness.
The twelve hundred members of the Stock Exchange...
were, walking to and fro like a slow-motion picture of a disturbed
ant-heap, offering each other enormous blocks of securities at a third of their old prices.
Churchill was to lose a fortune in the Crash that day.
Outside, the crowds continued to wait for news.
Rumours were fuelling the mounting panic.
Once the Crash is under way, the real question becomes one of confidence.
when you lose all confidence in the economy good and bad go down together
and so the chief investment elite
is at great pains to try to restore that confidence,
to convince people that the economy and the stock market is sound.
The bankers knew they had to do something to avert a total financial meltdown.
A Times journalist watched events unfold.
The crowd grew thicker and noisier,
and then there was an eddy in the middle of it
and a man in shirt-sleeves was pushing his way across the street in the direction of the Morgan offices.
This was Charles E. Mitchell, Chairman of the National City Bank.
He pushed his way into the offices of the house of Morgan
and a little later, we learned what he'd gone for.
Charles Mitchell had been summoned to a meeting at the offices of JP Morgan.
Around the table were four other leading bankers including Richard Whitney...
vice President of the New York Stock Exchange.
These were some of the wealthiest businessmen in America,
representing around six billion dollars in assets.
Chairman was Thomas Lamont.
Oh, I think it was a great shock to Grandfather.
He did not foresee that anything like the Great Crash that took place would happen.
Grandfather called a meeting, at his office at 23 Wall Street of some of the leading bankers in town
and figured out what they could do to support the stock market which was plunging.
What they came up with was a plan to put together a pool of 250 million dollars.
And those funds would be used to support a key list of stocks.
At lunchtime, Richard Whitney marched across the street
back to the trading floor of the Stock Exchange.
With a huge injection of the bankers' cash,
Whitney hoped to get the market moving again.
Whitney parades over to the desk where US Steel is being sold
and buys 25,000 shares of US steel at a price
well above what it was then selling for and then makes...
a similar promenade to other blue chip stocks
and makes a similar purchase, the idea being,
"We will now restore everybody's confidence in the market. "
And other great financial titans of the time including John D Rockefeller make similar
purchases hoping that this symbolic act will turn the tide.
And it worked.
Such was the magical power
of the Whitney name and the Morgan name that stock suddenly turned around and started to go up.
By now, news of the meeting had leaked out, and journalists were desperate for information.
Grandfather was meeting with a group of reporters who
were assembled on Wall Street outside of his bank office.
His style was always to stay calm and never
say anything that would cause, er, that would erode peoples' confidence in the Stock Market.
Silver-haired Mr Lamont received us with a manner so reassuring...
It was like the man who comes on the stage of a burning theatre and urges
everyone to keep perfectly cool, stating there is no cause for alarm.
There has been a little distress selling on the Stock Exchange
and we have held a meeting to discuss the situation.
We have found that there are no Houses in difficulty and margins are being maintained satisfactorily.
Grandfather and many others felt that the worst was over.
But they were very, very wrong.
Over the weekend, the bankers' intervention seemed to have worked...
trading on Friday and Saturday was calm and uneventful.
President Hoover also tried to steady nerves by repeating a mantra
that has been used during market crashes many times since.
The fundamental business of the country, that is production and
distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.
But in the offices of the Financial District, there was total chaos.
One of the things that we forget is how primitive the technology was,
so many stocks traded on October 24th that it took
four hours for the ticker to print all of the stock trades after the market had closed.
The ticker, hopelessly swamped, fell hours behind the actual trading and became completely meaningless.
All night long, the lights blazed
in the windows of the tall office buildings
where margin clerks and bookkeepers struggled with the desperate task
of trying to clear one day's business before the next day began.
They fainted at their desks, the weary runner fell exhausted on the marble floors of banks, and slept.
On Monday, with stock tickers running out of tape,
panicking investors, desperate for the latest share prices,
jammed the telephone lines between New York and other major cities.
For the first time, many speculators were discovering the downside of easy credit and buying on margin.
A fairly significant number of people who are buying stocks in
the 1920s were buying it with borrowed money, and of course the wonder of buying stocks with
borrowed money is that the gains are tremendously accelerated and magnified on the way up,
and then of course on the way down
the entire machinery is thrown into the reverse and the losses are also magnified.
All these people who had borrowed to buy stock now had to put up more collateral
and this was something that had not happened as the market had gone up and up.
If you've got 25 dollars down for 100 dollar stock but now if the stock has dropped.
So the brokerage's that had made all these loans got very concerned that the loans wouldn't be paid back.
So people got calls to bring in more cash or their stocks would be sold.
Account needs six hundred dollars, unless this amount received before 1.00pm Tuesday,
will sell all securities in your account...
Consider this notice to that effect.
And that's a difficult thing to do, some people didn't have additional cash to bring in or it took them
some time perhaps to do it, but the brokers were very uneasy they couldn't wait.
So Monday, the market begins to fall, even at a steeper rate than it fell on Thursday.
In fact this would turn out to be one of the very worst days ever
in the history of the United States stock market.
1929, when the stock market crashed I was a very young lady, just seven years old.
However, I do remember bits and pieces of that day
very clearly in my memory.
We did not have many means of communication.
and when anything extraordinary happened the papers, would put
out an extra, that's what it was called, an extra, for two cents.
And the little boys in their little peak hats
would come running through the streets screaming "Extra, extra, read all about it!"
And invariably somebody in the house would go down and buy a daily
for two cents and then we would know what happened and that's how we found out about the Crash.
At the time, Vera was with a family friend.
But news came that the friend's aunt had lost everything.
The little lady was crying quietly, she was crying quietly and wringing
her hands and wringing hands, and walking from room to room to room.
So that was my actual memory... of that day.
On Tuesday morning, some of the most famous names in corporate America
saw their share price plummet - US Steel, Radio, General Motors...
stocks that had been symbols of the boom years.
On Tuesday, there were just tremendous waves of selling that just kept coming.
This time, the selling was so powerful and so relentless,
there was no lunchtime meeting at JP Morgan.
Clearly the volume of the sales overwhelmed any possibility
of the bankers trying to stem the tide.
By evening Tuesday, all American stocks were worth about
22% less than they were when the market opened in the morning on Monday.
In 36 hours you lost 22% of the value of American industry.
Hoover was President
and he and Andrew Mellon the Secretary of the Treasury
were way to the right and felt that
it was not the Government's job to interfere with this.
They believed in pure unfettered capitalism
and so they did very little or nothing to alleviate the crash.
They said it it'll solve itself.
The market broke very sharply and a lot of people were wiped out with it.
It was very painful.
Almost everybody lost money as is happened now.
# Oh, the market's not so good today
# Your stocks look kinda sick
# In fact they all dropped down a point each time the tickers tick. #
It's estimated that by the end of these five days trading,
$25 billion dollars worth of personal wealth had simply disappeared.
The Stock Market continues to sag without end.
Have orders in to sell everything.
I figure I'll have about 500 left, if I'm lucky.
A humble ending to a potential profit not four months ago
of nearly a 100,000.
At least, I say to myself, I lost all in the greatest panic in history.
I was very lucky I never lost my job.
I did get a cut in salary, fortunately my employers were
wealthy people and when they told me about this they said,
"Why are you smiling?' I said, "I thought you were gonna fire me. "
Those who could afford to, faced their losses with black humour.
I am one of the lambs that Wall Street has shorn.
When I was a little girl,
a patron of art left me a million dollars for my musical education.
But I thought I couldn't live on the income from a million dollars,
so I asked all my rich friends for tips on the market.
They gave them to me and I lost my million.
Now the only thing I have left
is this chinchilla coat of mine.
From now, on my hands are off the ticker and on the piano keys.
But if you're lucky enough to have a million dollars,
hold everything
and don't play the market.
Another performer who had gambled and lost was Groucho Marx.
His reckless speculation cost him everything he'd earned.
The fate of Alice Austen, the photographer from Staten Island,
was also typical of those who had been lured into the market without realizing the risks.
Basically, she loses everything.
In '29, '30 her account is wiped out.
And it comes as a shock for Alice Austen.
And I don't think she believes it, like a lot of people, you just can't believe it.
And she thinks all I have to do
is to wait a little bit and the market will come back.
And she continued living as if she was rich.
And Alice also mortgaged her house,
not to pay her bills, but because she once again wanted to take a fancy trip to Europe.
My father lost everything. He was losing everything, but he was 22.
He took it magnanimously.
When you're 22 it isn't as dramatic.
The people around him were more... established people in
their fifties and sixties and were losing their life savings, were in an absolute panic.
Not everyone coped with their losses.
Although the number of suicides has been exaggerated, to some it seemed the only way out.
I know that people read about the stories on Wall Street of people
opening the windows in their offices and jumping out...
That actually happened, that isn't an urban legend.
People did commit suicide.
People who had worked 30 and 40 years on Wall Street and had amassed fortunes,
within a period of days, lost everything.
I'm sorry I was unable to return the two books until now,
the conditions down in the financial neighbourhood
have been such as to keep us working...
Yesterday, a woman jumped from the roof of our building, 44 floors, right past our window.
I saw her body lying in the street and the sight was so harrowing, that I became half sick.
The effects of the catastrophic Crash on Wall Street rippled out across America.
Even those who'd never owned shares...
and who'd never benefited from the stock-market boom...
became victims too.
The Crash had undermined Americans' faith in their fragile banking system, made up of thousands of
small town banks that lacked the size or reputation to convince customers that their money was safe.
As confidence in the economy sank further, a domino effect began.
In 1931, over 2,000 banks failed.
After the Crash. The banks closed.
That I think affected us a little more seriously,
us, meaning us the people of my stature.
Many people had money in the bank, little bit of money, couple of hundred dollars,
you know, £1,000 maybe.
There was no infrastructure then, there was no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
to guarantee people's deposits,
there was no way to back up the banks,
so if the banks had made bad choices,
you as a depositor paid for it, your money wasn't there.
And then people would hear that the bank down the street wasn't good
and they worried about their own bank and that'd cause a run on their bank and it was a terrible vicious cycle.
And something like 3,000 banks closed in the following
couple of years after that, and the whole financial system then seemed,
not just unstable, but worthless.
After that, when people saved money they were very leery of banks and money went under the mattress.
The stock market crash in 1929 did not create the Great Depression,
but it did start a sequence of events
that eventually culminated with the Great Depression.
Some of this is going to sound sort of familiar.
The banks were loaning money for the stock market, the company's were loaning money,
the brokerages were loaning money and when those prices fell, all that money just disappeared.
Almost immediately company's began to feel the pinch of not having
the capital and of having lost money,
and they began to lay off people, to let people go, to shut down production.
There were mass bankruptcies there was a liquidity crisis of exactly
the same kind we have today, that is to say all kinds of businesses could no longer get
loans to keep themselves afloat even if those businesses were entirely solvent, they couldn't get the kind
of short term commercial credit to pay their workers, to buy new inventory, to pay their suppliers.
And so they began going bankrupt and as they went bankrupt they laid
people off and as they laid people off demand fell.
And this is what does traumatic damage to the whole society, so traumatic that
it's second only to the Civil War in American memory as a tragic moment in American history.
My father had a modest-sized insurance brokerage agency.
One night at dinner, my father said that he had to fire an employee
and I very cavalierly said, "Well, he'll be able to get a job, won't he?"
And my father said,
"No, he's an older man who isn't very capable and I don't think he can. "
And at that point, my father burst into tears.
It was the first time I had ever seen my father cry.
There was such a change in our lives
and all the people around me after the Crash.
Many of my girlfriends' fathers lost their jobs
and they couldn't pay the rent, they were evicted.
The poverty was really all around us. Men had no clothing.
They were in rags, really rags.
They used to wrap their feet up in newspaper and put them in cardboard,
makeshift shoes to walk around the street.
And then if you took a walk over to Central Park you saw this big area,
a deserted reservoir that had been
drained and they made little huts of cardboard boxes,
and they would sleep there overnight.
And they called it Hooverville, because that was
the name of our President at the time and, of course, all this...
stock market crash and all this poverty was, of course, put in his lap.
It was really, really pitiful.
Like many others, the photographer, Alice Austen struggled to keep up
mortgage payments as the Great Depression took hold.
A few years into the Depression, Alice Austen runs out of money.
There is nothing left.
She is out of her house.
They take her to a poor house, and it's a poor house out of a Dickens' novel
and she lingers there for a couple of years.
Miraculously, her photographs are discovered.
A few of her photos are sold to Time and Life Magazine
and that earns her enough money to move out of the poor house and into a decent retirement home.
In a sense, her photographs come to her rescue and take
her out of poverty and into a year or two of decent living.
Paul Warburg, who so accurately predicted the Crash and the Depression,
saved the bank he ran from disaster by getting out of the market in time.
But it was of little consolation to him.
My great-grandfather probably never really recovered
his own personal equilibrium after the Crash.
To be called the Cassandra of Wall Street,
I think was very painful for him and if we all remember Cassandra,
she couldn't just see the future, she was also doomed to be disregarded.
And I think it caused him to go into a depression of his own.
I'm not sure that he ever would have said I told you so,
I think he felt that it was really tragic
that this worldwide depression could have been averted or headed off
or at least it didn't have to crash so hard and, and I think...
it probably led to his early death.
When he died, it was the last year of Hoover's presidency
and there was no end in sight.
But in 1932, 12 years of Republican rule came to an end.
I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear...
that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States.
Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in a landslide victory.
His first task was to restore confidence.
ROOSEVELT: The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.
Seen as a saviour, Roosevelt promised a New Deal for the American people,
and to regulate the financial system.
There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credit and investment.
There must be an end to speculation with other people's money.
The new President acted quickly.
He guaranteed bank deposits and introduced laws forcing bankers
to operate under strict government supervision.
An investigation into the Crash was launched by the Senate Banking Committee.
It would last more than three years, and the 10,000 pages of testimony
blackened the reputation of Wall Street.
The committee's ambitious lawyer, Ferdinand Pecora,
challenged the banking elite to account for their behaviour.
He calls these bankers to testify and what does he learn?
He learns that Charlie Mitchell of National City Corp had sold stock to his wife to avoid taxes.
Richard Whitney, who had so boldly bought stock on Black Thursday lost money of his own
and began borrowing from his brother and when that didn't work, he began stealing from customers.
He ended up in jail, doing time.
The most prestigious bank in America, JP Morgan was also found to be far from blameless.
The hearings uncovered evidence of a list that offered preferential
deals on stocks to friends in high places...
including a former President.
There were not only Morgan partners and Morgan family members, but also
prominent corporate executives and even some politicians...
Calvin Coolidge was on the preferred stock-list, for example.
That was a practice...
that a lot of people felt was wrong.
Ferdinand Pecora had a great quote, he said, "it was shocking disclosures of low standards in high places,"
which I love because you know you could say the same thing today.
In response to public outrage at the bankers' dirty dealings,
President Roosevelt set up the Securities and Exchange Commission...
its task - to clean up Wall Street.
At its head, he chose a man who knew more about unethical practice than most.
President Roosevelt when he introduced the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate
Wall Street, named his old friend and supporter Joe Kennedy to be the first chairman.
That's putting the fox in the chicken coup.
Although Roosevelt restored confidence in the banking system,
the Great Depression would last until the outbreak of World War II.
Then as now, the globalised economy meant that
the Crash and subsequent Depression rippled out across the world.
In Britain, there was a slump in manufacturing and millions lost their jobs.
Germany... still suffering from defeat in the First World War...
was hit even harder.
So many people had their life savings destroyed during
the Great Depression that it created in many countries a desire for some
authoritarian government that would save them, that would rescue the economy.
No doubt that the Crash and the Depression strengthened anti-capitalist movements.
The communists had taken over in Russia and there were rising fascist movements.
Mussolini was already in power in Italy.
And Hitler's political base was growing in Germany.
And when American-style free-market capitalism suffered from this Wall Street Crash
followed by a depression, it just strengthened those people who wanted to say there's a better way.
While communism and fascism prospered, many nations put up barriers to prevent free trade
and turned inwards, in an attempt to save their economies.
Economic nationalism led to trade wars, and later...
world war.
80 years on, those who remember the bubble of the '20s
and the Crash that followed, feel that they have seen it all before.
I don't think we learned anything from it.
I have found that people's memories are very short.
They make the same type of leveraged commitments where they don't look at the downside risk.
You have a lot of cheap credit in the 1920s.
Now we've had cheap credit and people have speculated on houses
and now the housing bubble has collapsed.
You have a heavily leveraged American consumer...
he's into debt up to his eyeballs, and he can't sustain that debt.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis is a symptom of that.
In the '80s and '90s,
faith in the free market had revived, and as optimism returned,
many of the financial regulations which Roosevelt had introduced
were felt to be outdated, and were slowly dismantled.
Yet again, a lightly regulated market allowed speculation to grow unchecked.
We are now reaping the whirlwind of that deregulation and in that sense we're in
exactly the same position as people were in 1929 when the Government
turned a blind eye to what was going on in the financial world.
What I do hope and I do think, is that the government has
learned it lessons and is trying to take steps that are much active
and much more aggressive than what was taken in the '30s,
to try and stem the pain and stem the decline.
The hope is that such steps will work.
But the lessons from the Crash of 1929 are that history repeats itself,
that human folly and greed are much stronger forces in financial affairs
than reason and restraint.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
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