A look at the Black Tuesday crash of the New York Stock Exchange and if it caused the Great Depression

The main characteristic of U.S. stock exchange was mass speculation throughout the late 1920's. In 1929 alone, a record volume of 1,124 billion shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange, while in less than one year Dow Jones Industrial average rose from 191 to 381. This situation intrigued investors, who became uninterested in corporate results and focused on the potential profits from the constant increase in the stock prices. Moreover, investors were buying stocks on margin by borrowing from their brokers as they didn’t actually have the money to purchase them. This led to an absurd increase of market performance and incurred huge profits for the investors. In the 1930s, the total of outstanding brokers' loans was $8.5 billion, while interest rates for broker’s loans were skyrocketing reaching even 20%.

In this speculative environment, the stock prices had begun declining since September 3, 1929, but on October 21 a free fall of prices panicked mostly the average investors, who started selling quickly in the fear of even greater losses. Although the prices stabilized the next two, on October 24 the system collapsed collectively as institutional and major investors lost confidence in the market. Big banking corporations tried to stop the crash, but it was obvious that the market’s correction mechanisms could not work under these panicky conditions. On Tuesday, October 29, 1929 Dow Jones recorded a decline of 13% and 16.4 million shares changes hands.

Black Tuesday of October 29, 1929 is broadly considered as the beginning of the Great Depression Era for the United States, but also for the economic system around the globe. However, it is a fact that, since September 1929 the U.S. stock exchange had declined by nearly 40% in less than five weeks. It is also a fact that since the beginning of 1920s, capitalist systems had experienced periods of panic and depressions as a result of ineffective economic policies and practices, both governmental and private. In this turbulent environment, investors had lost their confidence to the market before 1929, but they kept on investing being captured by extreme profitability from margin investing.

Therefore, Black Tuesday did not exactly caused the Great Depression. It was actually a correction of the market considering the 13% losses of that day compared to the average of 40% of the previous weeks. However, as market mechanisms were unable to reverse the situation and force required correction of errors, stock exchange ultimately collapsed.