If you dig into the episode....which few historians really get into finance details....there’s this drop a day or two prior to the big drop....and it appears that a small number of individuals knew of some big calamity coming in the days ahead, and shed their accounts....walking away.
I should also point out in 1914....just after the crown prince is killed from the Hapsburg Empire.....the British stock market fell apart in just a matter of a day or two. Almost no historian will touch that story today....but for a brief time (several days)...banks across England went into holiday status, and most people expected absolute failures to occur. We never hear about that episode.
Lot of things about this era of 1900 to mid-1930s....we just seem to lack real history on or understanding. It’s funny....we know more about 1865....than 1929.
So true.
The 1929 leg down began when it became apparent there were the votes in the Senate to ensure that Smoot-Hawley would move to reconciliation.