Word: stockings
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Seventy-nine years ago this week, the New York Stock Exchange experienced the worst financial panic the country had ever seen. There have been more crashes since - with bigger numbers and bigger losses - but nothing quite rivals the terror and devastation of Black Tuesday: October...
...them, radio had been invented, and automobiles were growing cheaper and more popular. Sure, the disparity between the rich and the poor had widened within the past decade, but Americans could now buy goods on installment plans - a relatively new concept - and families could afford more than ever before. Stocks were on a tear: between 1924 and 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average quadrupled. At that time, it was the longest bull market ever recorded; some thought it would last forever. In the fall of 1929, economist Irving Fisher announced that "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanent...
...last hour of trading on Thursday, Oct. 23, 1929, stock prices suddenly plummeted. When the closing bell rang at 3 p.m. people were shaken. No one was sure what had just happened, but that evening provided enough time for fear and panic to set in. When the market opened again the next day, prices plunged with renewed violence. Stock transactions in those days were printed on ticker tape, which could only produce 285 words a minute. Thirteen million shares changed hands - the highest daily volume in the exchange's history at that point - and the tape didn't stop running...
...quickly that although people knew they were losing money, they didn't know how much. Rumors of investors jumping out of buildings spread through Wall Street; although they weren't true, they drove the prices down further. Brokers called in margins; if stockholders couldn't pay up, their stocks were sold, wiping out many an investor's life savings in an instant. So many trades were made - each recorded on a slip of paper - that traders didn't know where to store them, and ended up stuffing them into trash cans. One trader fainted from exhaustion, was revived...
...total, $25 billion - some $319 billion in today's dollars - was lost in the 1929 crash. Stocks continued to fall over subsequent weeks, finally bottoming out on November 13, 1929. The market recovered for a few months and then slid again, gliding swiftly and steadily with the rest of the country into the Great Depression. Companies incurred huge layoffs, unemployment skyrocketed, wages plummeted and the economy went into a tailspin. While World War II helped pull the country out of a Depression by the early 1940s, the stock market wouldn't recover to its pre-crash numbers until...