50 Fun Facts About Wall Street Crash of 1929

What nickname is given to October 29, 1929, when panicked investors traded some 16 million shares in a single day?

Black Tuesday wiped out about $14 billion of stock value, and some shares found no buyers at any price.

Shanty towns built by the homeless after the 1929 crash were mockingly named after which US president?

Herbert Hoover, in office when the market fell, was widely blamed for the slump, so the camps became Hoovervilles. An empty pocket turned inside out was a Hoover flag.

Which risky 1920s practice left brokers' loans by August 1929 larger than all the US currency in circulation?

Buying on margin meant putting down part of a share's price and borrowing the rest from a broker. When prices fell, lenders called in the money and forced sales fed the panic.

Which politician was governor of New York, home of Wall Street, when the stock market crashed in October 1929?

Franklin D. Roosevelt had been governor for under a year, and weeks before the crash he set up a state committee to look into utility securities. He won the White House in 1932.

The Dow Jones did not climb back to its September 1929 peak until which US president was in office?

Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House when the index finally passed its old high in November 1954, a full 25 years after the peak.

By the time the Dow Jones hit bottom in July 1932, roughly how much of its 1929 peak value had vanished?

About 90% of the index's value was gone: it sank from 381 in September 1929 to 41 in July 1932, its lowest close of the 20th century.

Which British politician, later a wartime prime minister, lost heavily in the 1929 Wall Street crash?

Winston Churchill then set off on a lecture tour of North America, hoping to win back what the crash had cost him.

Which show-business newspaper ran a famous 1929 headline joking that Wall Street had laid an egg?

Variety, founded in New York in 1905 by Sime Silverman to cover theater and vaudeville, printed the headline on October 30, 1929, while the market was still reeling.

Which New York skyscraper, begun months after the 1929 crash, had so few tenants it was mocked as empty?

Empire State Building construction started in March 1930 and took just over 13 months, but the slump left it so unlet that New Yorkers called it the Empty State Building.

Which stock speculator, father of a future president, was named first head of the US market watchdog in 1934?

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. had profited by betting on falling prices after the 1929 crash, then spent a year policing the kind of trading he knew from the inside.

Which stock exchange vice president, later jailed for embezzlement, placed the bankers' showy bids on October 24, 1929?

Richard Whitney was hailed as the White Knight of Wall Street for the stunt, but in 1938 he went to Sing Sing prison for stealing from, among others, the New York Yacht Club.

On October 24, 1929, the bankers' pool tried to calm the panic with a showy bid for shares of which company?

U.S. Steel drew a bid of $205 a share, above the going price, and the gesture worked for a day: the Dow closed only about 2% down.

Which federal agency was created in 1934 to police the stock market and stamp out the abuses of the 1920s?

The Securities and Exchange Commission took over enforcement of the 1933 truth-in-securities law from the Federal Trade Commission, which had policed share sales for a year.

Which agency, created in 1933 after thousands of American banks failed, still protects savers if their bank collapses?

The FDIC was born in the Banking Act of 1933 after nearly 10,000 banks failed in four years, and it boasts that no depositor has lost a penny of insured money since.

Which 1933 law, named after its two sponsors, forced American banks to split everyday banking from stock dealing?

The Glass–Steagall Act walled off commercial banks, which take deposits and make loans, from investment banks that underwrite and sell securities. The wall came down in 1999.

Which 1930 law raised American import duties so high that over a thousand economists begged for a veto?

The Smoot–Hawley Tariff became law in June 1930 despite a petition from 1,028 economists, and trading partners hit back with duties of their own as world trade plummeted.

Which Yale economist declared, days before the 1929 crash, that stock prices had reached a permanently high plateau?

Irving Fisher, perhaps the first celebrity economist, lost much of his wealth and reputation in the crash, and for months kept assuring investors that recovery was near.

Which forecaster's September 1929 warning that a crash was coming set off a market dip the press named after him?

Roger Babson told a business conference on September 5, 1929, that a crash was coming, and the slide that followed was dubbed the Babson Break. He also founded Babson College.

Which speculator, nicknamed the Boy Plunger, made about $100 million betting against the market in the 1929 crash?

Jesse Livermore hid his bets by spreading them across more than 100 brokers, and when the public blamed him for the crash he got death threats and hired an armed bodyguard.

Which economist wrote The Great Crash, 1929, a bestselling 1955 history of the stock market collapse?

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote it during a break from another book and called it the only one he remembered as a joy, not a labor. It blamed the crash on rampant speculation.

Which famous banker caused an outcry at 1933 Senate hearings by admitting he had paid no income tax for two years?

J. P. Morgan Jr. admitted that he and many of his partners had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932. The revelations built public support for new banking and securities laws.

The Senate inquiry into the causes of the 1929 crash is remembered by the name of which chief counsel?

Ferdinand Pecora, a Sicilian-born New York prosecutor, was the fourth chief counsel and was hired only to write the final report. He asked for more hearings and made headlines instead.

Charles E. Mitchell, who pledged $25 million to halt a March 1929 market slide, was president of which New York lender?

National City Bank, a forerunner of Citibank, was run by a man the press called Sunshine Charley for his relentless selling of securities. A Senate exposé later forced him to resign.

Which private New York lender failed after a December 1930 panic at its Bronx branch?

The Bank of United States had no link to the government, and rivals had warned that its name would mislead immigrants. Its fall is said to have started the collapse of American banking.

In March 1933, Washington shut every American bank for four days while Congress passed emergency laws, under what name?

A banking holiday had already spread from state to state, with Michigan shutting its banks for eight days in February 1933 as savers rushed to pull out their deposits.

Britain abandoned which monetary system in 1931, and so recovered from the slump sooner than countries that kept it?

The gold standard tied a currency to bullion, which limited how much money central banks could create to fight the slump. France and Belgium clung to it and recovered later.

A frenzied mid-1920s land boom in which US state, ended by a 1926 hurricane, set the mood for the stock market bubble?

Florida drew property speculators from all over the nation between 1924 and 1926, until a hurricane that struck Miami finished off the boom.

Which Wall Street firm sponsored the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge investment trusts that collapsed in the 1929 crash?

Goldman Sachs's trusts took in ordinary people's savings but were built on borrowed money, which multiplied the losses once prices turned.

Which General Motors founder joined a failed bid to prop up share prices on October 29, 1929, and later went bankrupt?

William C. Durant bought stock alongside members of the Rockefeller family to show confidence in the market, but prices kept falling. By 1936 he was bankrupt.

At the depth of the slump in 1933, roughly what share of American workers had no job?

About 1 in 4 workers were unemployed by 1933, when roughly a third of farmers had lost their land and 9,000 of the country's 25,000 banks had gone under.

Which trading tactic, blamed for the 1929 crash, was later restricted by a rule allowing it only after a price rise?

Short selling means selling borrowed shares in the hope of buying them back cheaper. The uptick rule, in force from 1938 to 2007, was meant to stop it driving prices down.

Which animal gives its name to a long falling market, like the slide that ran from 1929 to 1932?

A bear market describes a downward trend and a bull market an upward one, and statues of the two beasts stand in front of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Shares in big, dependable companies, like those the bankers bid for in 1929, take which nickname from poker?

Blue chips are the highest-value chips in a simple poker set, and Dow Jones company lore credits the stock market use to employee Oliver Gingold in the 1920s.

Which US institution, created in 1913, is widely faulted for letting the money supply shrink after the 1929 crash?

The Federal Reserve had warned against speculation in March 1929, yet economists broadly agree it should then have expanded the money supply and acted as lender of last resort.

Which Treasury Secretary of the boom years urged that the slump after the 1929 crash be left to purge the economy?

Andrew Mellon, who ran the Treasury from 1921 to 1932, saw recessions as a necessary purge and reportedly advised liquidating labor, stocks, farmers and real estate.

Which European country, heavily dependent on American loans, saw unemployment near 30% after the 1929 crash?

Germany had rebuilt on short-term American credit, and when the loans stopped the slump fed the political extremism that brought the Nazi Party to power in 1933.

Which nickname, borrowed from electrical wiring, do stock exchanges give to automatic pauses in trading during a plunge?

Circuit breakers arrived in 1988, in answer to the crash of October 1987, when the Dow fell 22.6% in a day, a steeper one-day drop than any in 1929.

A slump in the price of which crop, after bumper European harvests in August 1929, sent a shiver through Wall Street?

Wheat had climbed from 97 cents a bushel in May to $1.49 in July on news of drought, then slid when France and Italy reported fine harvests.

Which brokerage-office machine ran hours behind during the panic of October 1929?

The stock ticker fell so far behind on October 24 that investors had no idea what their shares were worth, and on October 29 it kept printing until about 7:45 in the evening.

The New York Stock Exchange, heart of the 1929 crash, stands on Wall Street in which New York City borough?

Manhattan's Wall Street runs just eight city blocks, from Broadway to the East River, yet its name stands for the whole American financial industry.

The banking and stock market reforms that followed the 1929 crash formed part of which 1930s presidential program?

The New Deal opened with a burst of laws in its first hundred days of 1933, among them the rule that anyone selling shares to the public must tell the truth about them.

Which series of presidential radio talks began in March 1933 with an explanation of the American banking crisis?

Fireside chats began on March 12, 1933, the evening before the banks started to reopen, with a national radio address on what had been done to make them safe.

Which neighbor hit back at America's steep 1930 import duties with new levies on 16 US products?

Canada acted in May 1930, before the bill was even law, taxing goods that made up about 30% of American exports there, and later drew closer to the British Empire.

Which lending agency was set up in 1932 to rescue America's failing banks, railroads and local governments?

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation began work in February 1932, modelled on a First World War lending body, and went on to finance munitions factories in the Second.

The 1931 failure of the Creditanstalt bank, which spread the financial panic across Europe, happened in which city?

Vienna's Creditanstalt, founded by the Rothschild family in 1855, revealed crippling losses in May 1931, and the run that followed spread to banks in Germany and beyond.

Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz gave which name to the collapse of America's money supply between 1929 and 1933?

The Great Contraction, in their telling, was a banking crisis that wiped out a third of all banks and shrank the money supply by 35%, turning a slump into a catastrophe.

Which British financier's empire collapsed in a forgery scandal in September 1929, weeks before Wall Street crashed?

Clarence Hatry had borrowed against forged securities to fund a huge industrial merger; he confessed and was sentenced to 14 years. His fall is cited as one trigger of the crash.

Which Chicago utilities magnate's empire collapsed after the 1929 crash, wiping out 600,000 shareholders?

Samuel Insull controlled a $500 million empire with only $27 million in equity. Its fall helped bring about a 1935 law reining in utility holding companies.

Which yardstick of how expensive shares are stood at 32.6 for S&P Composite stocks in September 1929, far above normal?

The price-to-earnings ratio compares a share's price with the profit behind it, so a reading of 32.6 meant buyers were paying for more than 32 years of earnings up front.

The bankers' October 1929 plan to prop up prices by buying stock copied a tactic from which earlier crisis?

The Panic of 1907 ended after leading New York bankers pledged large sums of their own money to shore up the system; in 1929 the same trick bought only a few days.