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Black Thursday, Black Monday, Black Tuesday. October 1929. The margin calls. The bucket shops. Charles Merrill and the warnings. The Federal Reserve's contraction. The banks that failed. The Great Depression...
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Black Thursday, Black Monday, Black Tuesday. October 1929. The margin calls. The bucket shops. Charles Merrill and the warnings. The Federal Reserve's contraction. The banks that failed. The Great Depression it triggered. Hoovervilles and the Dust Bowl. Roosevelt's New Deal. Glass-Steagall. The SEC. The lessons that had to be relearned in 2008. The eight-year climb back to 1929's peak. The moment American capitalism nearly died. — a daily series with new episodes every day.
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29 SEP 2026 · Most people believe the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a single catastrophic day. The truth is both stranger and more instructive: it was a mechanism — built into the market over years of reckless speculation — that made collapse not just possible but inevitable once the trigger was pulled.
In this opening chapter, we trace the origins of the disaster through the speculative fever of the 1920s, when ordinary Americans — factory workers, shopkeepers, first-time investors — poured into a stock market running on borrowed money. Buying on margin meant putting down as little as ten cents on the dollar and borrowing the rest. It amplified gains spectacularly. It amplified losses catastrophically. Alongside the formal exchanges, unregulated bucket shops spread through American cities, feeding the frenzy at its most reckless edges.
Charles Merrill saw the danger early and warned his clients to pull back. Almost no one listened.
Then came Black Thursday, Black Monday, and Black Tuesday — three days in October 1929 that set off a margin-call cascade no intervention could stop. Prices fell 87 percent from peak to trough by 1932. Nearly nine-tenths of stock market value: gone.
But a stock market crash didn't have to become the Great Depression. What sealed that fate was the Federal Reserve's decision to contract the money supply by 31 percent between 1929 and 1933 — cutting the water supply to a burning building. When ten thousand banks failed across three waves of panic, deposits didn't just change hands. They ceased to exist.
This is the story of how American capitalism nearly died — and what it took to bring it back. This episode includes AI-generated content.
Black Thursday, Black Monday, Black Tuesday. October 1929. The margin calls. The bucket shops. Charles Merrill and the warnings. The Federal Reserve's contraction. The banks that failed. The Great Depression...
show more
Black Thursday, Black Monday, Black Tuesday. October 1929. The margin calls. The bucket shops. Charles Merrill and the warnings. The Federal Reserve's contraction. The banks that failed. The Great Depression it triggered. Hoovervilles and the Dust Bowl. Roosevelt's New Deal. Glass-Steagall. The SEC. The lessons that had to be relearned in 2008. The eight-year climb back to 1929's peak. The moment American capitalism nearly died. — a daily series with new episodes every day.
show less
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