Docu - The Crash of 1929

remember sprouts which you see gathered outside the stock exchange are due to the distraction [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] December 31st you using the crash and it's terrible consequences were still in the future financial leaders everyone celebrated what had been a decade of prosperity and boundless optimism they thought the party would last forever they called it the new era 1929 all the hope and promise and illusion of the twenties converged in that one year the United States is afflicted with new earrings let us not think for a moment that the illusion the aberration of the 1920s was unique it is intimately a part of the American character the mood of the era I think can best be remembered by the hit song was that 1929 blue skies in the twenties yes those guys never saw the sun shining so bright never saw things going so right gray day it's all of them gone nothing but blue skies from [Music] that was the whole tenor of the day I mean people believed that everything was going to be great always always there was a feeling of optimism in the air that you cannot even describe today and everybody seemed to have an interest in the stock market certainly the bootblack the tailor the grocer own shares of one kind or another this was the first time that many ordinary Americans had begun to invest in stocks a stock a share of a company is bought and sold here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange the stocks themselves have no fixed value as in an auction if the stock is in demand its price goes up no demand and the price goes down for almost eight straight years stock values had been rising by 1929 there seemed to be no upper limits in this world of paper numbers and dreams it was an arena of unbounded opportunity where somebody like my grandfather could come into it and make a fortune so many people made so much money in the the market that late in the 20s and it seemed that you just couldn't go wrong buying stocks and American companies he was a whole new way to make a fortune unlike the Carnegie's and the Rockefellers of previous decades who built steel mills and dug oil wells men like Michael Mian Jesse Livermore and Charles Mitchell had amassed their fortunes buying and selling stocks pieces of paper the public was fascinated bankers brokers and speculators had become celebrities and they lived like royalty I can hardly believe that a family lived in this kind of a house I mean today it would be almost unbelievable six stories and these great big rooms enormous we counted up the other day we had 16 living helped in this house aside from all the help we had in the tuxedo park house in the South Hampton house as well but those days are gone forever we never thought of it as being grandiose because practically everybody when you seem to live in the same way Josie Livermore had a ticker tape in every home that he owned they had a beautiful house on 76th Street in Manhattan on the west side of Central Park they had a floor at 813 Fifth Avenue because Dorothy Ann did not like to go to the west side to change her clothes so they had a house in Great Neck they had a summer house in Lake Placid they had a house in Palm Beach they had private railroad car to yachts oh they lived they really lived few Americans live like Jesse Livermore but there was a rising expectation that everyone could have a piece of this prosperity during his presidential campaign of 1928 candidate Herbert Hoover would make this extraordinary promise when poverty will be banished [Applause] there was great hope America came out of World War one with it yet khana me intact you're the only strong country in the world the dollar was king we had a very popular president in the middle of a decade Calvin Coolidge and an even more popular one elected 1928 Herbert Hoover so things look pretty good the economy was changing in this new America it was the dawn of the consumer revolution new inventions mass marketing factories turning out amazing products like radios rayon air conditioners underarm deal this is a period in which the American household gets the washing machine it's a refrigerator and goes off gas light and gets electricity in some cities this is a period in which people would buy little plugs to put into the outlets at the wall so the electricity wouldn't leak on the floor what will they think of next was a 1920 saying this new thing is continually coming out and there were new things which you could enjoy not just for the few one of the most wondrous inventions of the age was consumer credit before 1920 the average worker couldn't borrow money by 1929 by now pay later had become a way of life so there were changes many changes in the way people viewed the world and all of them optimistic you extrapolate the curve what do you have permanent prosperity that was a tenth term one heard in the late 1920s we rented an age of permanent prosperity Wall Street got the credit for this prosperity and Wall Street was dominated by just a small group of wealthy men rarely in the history of this nation had so much raw power been concentrated in the hands of a few businessmen men like William C Durant it's almost impossible to realize the power and the significant of the men in Flint when mr. Durant came to flee it occasionally people used to say Durant easy now just like that Durant is in town he will be bigger than life earlier in the century Durant had founded General Motors now he made his money on Wall Street backed by Midwestern Auto industrialists he controls so much money that he could single-handedly drive up the price of a stock and then sell reaping huge profits he was just at the apotheosis at the maximum of his power he managed according to the voices of the time according to what was said anywhere between two to five billion dollars which in those days were fabulous the market was filled with Bulls and he was the bull of the rules Durant came to Wall Street as one of the titans of industry Jesse Livermore whose fortune was estimated at over one hundred million dollars never did anything in his life but play the market everything Jesse was more touched turned to gold it seemed Pollyanna do was to press a button and the stock will go up ten points and that meant of course it just won't make a lot of money so the average American would look at this and say gee if only I knew what he was doing I could make money too how do you get in on Jesse little Moore's brains Livermore was a speculative pure and simple he didn't study the health of a company he didn't care whether it made a profit or paid a dividend for him the stock market was an abstract game of numbers money was not the end for this man at all money was a very peripheral thing for him but beating the odds winning a game that was that was his objective he was a numbers man he lived by the numbers he took an elevator by the numbers he came into town by the numbers everything was done by numbers when he left his house in the morning he did not leave at 8:10 he left at 8:07 all of the policemen knew because at this time scheduled then he would be going down Fifth Avenue let's say at 837 you know of course traffic lights were hand operated that had policemen on boxes so the instant that they saw his car the lights were green he never stopped for a red light the success of large speculators like Livermore and Durant lured smaller investors to Wall Street but charles mitchell president of national city bank virtually invented the idea of mass marketing stocks and bonds to the general public this was a totally new idea and a huge success the bank prior to father's being elected president in 1921 was geared mainly to doing business with large corporations father pointed the bank for the first time in the direction of going after the little man and well yato mom all right how old was he then thirty-eight years old and the National City company had four offices I know within three years there were over 50 offices and by 1929 it was the largest distributor of securities in the world even at the height of the speculative frenzy only a small percentage of the American public actually invested in stocks but the market had entered popular culture Wall Street became mainstream everyone was talking stops watching the ticker became a national sport popular magazines covered financial news dozens of bestsellers promised investors the inside track [Music] got me feeling bigger the characters in the popular comic strip gasoline Ali were investing in a company called rubber taeho stock tips came from everywhere some investors followed the advice of Evangeline Adams an astrologer she was able to calculate the variations of the stock exchange so accurately that there was practically no difference to having I've read it in a ledger somewhere among her more interesting France where Charles Chaplin Mary Pickford and J Pierpont Morgan in February Evangeline Adams looked at the Stars and predicted a dramatic upswing in stock prices for the coming months [Music] the stock market once considered a highly risky place to put your money was now beginning to attract a whole new group of amateur speculators among the new players was one Julius marks everyone knew him by his stage name Groucho but they were poor and my father had always affected my father because he was always kind of thrifty and worried about his future and work would become him when no one else wanted him as an actor anymore so he was always saving money turning off the lights and turning off the water around the house even after he was in Hollywood and making a lot of money of all the Marx Brothers Groucho was the most financially conservative in 1929 he took his life savings and put it in a sure thing the stock market he was always following a broker and getting hot tips and well you know what the stocks were that how they were doing and he wasn't on a phone he would take me in the Great Neck which was a little village at the time if they did have a stock book or called Newman brothers and worms and all these men who are investing in the mark but I'll sit there in chairs like a little theater and watch the ticker-tape go by Groucho along with Rickon numbers of smaller investors was borrowing money to buy stocks it was called buying on margin you only needed 10% down just a thousand dollars would get you ten thousand dollars worth of stock if suddenly you were in the same league with the big players or so it seemed but the stock market was not a level playing field in the 20s and 30s one of the big features of the stock market is the fact that it wasn't controlled and that operators could do a lot of things that are not permitted today one of the most common tactics was to manipulate the price of a particular stock a stock like Radio Corporation of America RC I was in the 20s what the Xerox was in the 60s what was a great growth stock the stock went from I can't remember the exact numbers but from something like twenty to four hundred split many times and made many people including my grandfather very wealthy it was one of these stocks that was manipulated by a pool well the investors would pool their money in a secret agreement to buy a stock inflate its price and then sell it to an unsuspecting public most thoughts in the 1920s were regularly manipulated by insiders like RCA specialists Michael Mian in those days that was legal and it was quite common practice for a group of Wall Streeters to take a stock in hand and they would acquire a position in the stock early on and then they would see to it that there was good press on the stock a lot of publicity I would say that practically all the financial journals want to take this inclusion poise for The Wall Street Journal the New York Times The Herald Tribune you name it so if you were a a pool operator you'd call your friend at the Times and say look Charlie there's an envelope waiting for you here and when you think that perhaps you should write something nice about RCA and Charlotte would write something that is by RCA publicity man called a Newton plumber had canceled checks from well practically every major journalist in New York City then they would begin to what was called painting the tape and they would make the stock look exciting they would trade among themselves and you'd see these big prints and RCA and people will say oh it looks as though that stock is being accumulated now they are behind it you want to join them so well you want you buy stock also and what's happening is the stock goes from ten to fifteen to twenty and now is a twenty and you start buying other people start buying 3040 the original group the pool they stopped buying they're selling you the stock it's now 50 and they're out of it and what happens of course is the stock collapses on March 8 1929 Michael mean began one of the most successful pools on Wall Street from the 8th to the 17th mian and the pool pushed up the value of RCA almost 50 percent on March 18th they sold and divided up their profits in today's money they had made 100 million dollars for one week's worth the pools were little like musical chairs when the music stopped somebody owned the stocks and that those were the sufferers if small investors suffered they would soon be back for more they knew the game was raped but maybe next time they could beat the system [Music] Wall Street had its critics among them economist Roger Babson he questioned the boom and was accused of lack of patriotism of selling America short Roger Babson warned of the speculation said there's going to be a crash and the aftermath is going to be quite terrible and people jumped on Babson from all around for saying such a thing so that people who were cautious about their personal reputation who did not want to call down on themselves a lot of calamy kept quiet mobster Al Capone was not a cautious man from his Chicago headquarters he condemned the wild speculation on Wall Street it's a racket easy a stock market guys a crooked Capone invested his money in a 100 million-dollar bootleg liquor business business was good on Valentine's Day 1929 he had just eliminated the competition March fourth inauguration day Republican President Calvin Coolidge had run his administration on the belief that business was the basis of America's prosperity government should not interfere Herbert Hoover had won a landslide victory promising to carry on the tradition this was a time in our history when governments did not as now take responsibility for the economy they presided over it but the level of government of economic activity and the level of economic growth and the stability of prices were not yet everyday concerns of the president and what Coolidge did was to say how wonderful times were how happy everyone but he was going to be and how prosperous everyone was going to be and Hoover's responsibility was to continue that optimism [Music] uber politicians came and went but in the 20s the businessman was canned New York City had a dapper corrupt and vastly popular mayor Jimmy Walker but behind the scenes were powerful financial leaders like Charles Mitchell Jimmy Walker was high wide and fancy with the city finances one day father called mayor Walker up here and he had some other bankers with him and Mayor Walker was sort of put on the grill in the upstairs library and while these Bank has read the riot act to him to try and get some fiscal responsibility instilled into him and I know that after the meeting someone took me into the library and pointed pointed me out the chair that the mayor had been sitting in and they'd been so nervous all those Louis quatorze chairs with a chance chairs a little tax in their brass tax and he pulled out almost all of grass tax they were sitting on the floor out of sheer nerves [Music] the stock market too was getting a severe case of nerves on Friday March 22nd all eyes were on that August government body in Washington the federal reserve board the board distrusted the boon they saw the speculation as reckless and dangerous because it was based more and more on the shaky foundation of borrowed money margin the board had the power to curb the borrowing but the market was now dependent on borrowed money without margin it would collapse the Board met day after day would they ask for regulation of the stock market they issued no public statements their silence was terrifying get my broker get my broker on Monday March 25th investors began to sell blue chip stocks plunged Tuesday another wave of selling swept the market as it fell people holding stock on margin were hit hard they put only 10% down but the value of their stock dropped more than 10% so their down payment was gone to hold their stocks they'd have to put up more money on March 26th millions of investors suddenly found themselves in deep trouble your broker would call you and say we need more money you'll wiped out unless you could give him more money he would then sell the stock now he would sell the stock which would call the stock to go down to 83 85 86 and now more margin calls are triggered so 1 margin called fig is another margin for trade another margin call and it goes all the way down with everyone trying to borrow money to cover the falling value of their stocks there was a credit crunch interest rates soared and 20% few people could afford to borrow more money the boom was about to collapse like a house of cards Charlie Mitchell was horrified his success his entire career his personal fortune had been based on a rising market if nobody else was going to stop the crash Charles Mitchell would father at that point stepped in and announced that the National City Bank would provide 25 million dollars of credit which was all very well and very necessary but he added the fateful words whatever the Federal Reserve Board thinks and Senator Carter glass who had been sort of the father of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 took that as a direct slap across the face but whatever senator glass thought immediately the credit crisis was alleviated in fact within the next 24 hours coal money went from 20 percent to 8 percent and that stopped the panic then in March the next day the market rallied the Federal Reserve Board remained silent tacitly accepting defeat the hero of the day was Charlie Mitchell he had single-handedly stopped the crash of 29 with the start of the baseball season people quickly forgot the break-in market new events filled the pages there was a crisis in Nicaragua where the nationalist hero Augusto Santino was threatening American marines tragedy in the British Mandate of Palestine as Jews and Arabs clashed over control of holy sites in Jerusalem and in Antarctica commander Byrd was at his base camp little America waiting for a break in the weather his elaborately planned flight over the South Pole was still on ice the newsreels had come into their own now in living Sun patrons could keep abreast of the important events of the day the biggest news of the day is not the naval agreement not even prohibition but the return of the natural waistline [Music] Dorothy Livermore was a typical flapper she has to embody the upon ease she would do almost anything on an impulse if she had some priceless pieces 18th century furniture but the house had settled and the floors were not level but mrs. Livermore didn't like to spend money that didn't show so instead of having the hoists put underneath she simply solved the problem by having the legs of the furniture cut off to fit the sloping floors so that the tops of all the furniture were level but of course the legs were on different angles and this was her typical solution it goes long as the tops were level everything was fine everything was not fine that spring with the American economy it was showing ominous signs of trouble steel production was declining the construction industry was sluggish car sales dropped customers were getting harder to find and because of easy credit many people were deeply in debt large sections of the population were poor and getting poorer just as Wall Street had reflected a steady growth in the economy throughout most of the 20s it would seem that now the market should reflect the economic slowdown instead it's soared to record Heights stock prices no longer had anything to do with company profits the economy or anything else the speculative boom had acquired a momentum of its own this is the nature of mass illusion prices were going up people Bob that forced prices up further that brought in more people and eventually the process becomes self-perpetuating every increase brings then more people convinced of their god-given right to get rich the 20s was a decade of all sorts of fast money schemes three years earlier everyone was buying Florida real estate as prices of land skyrocketed more people jumped in hoping to make a killing then overnight the boom turned to bust and investors lost everything in May the Marx Brothers were before the cameras with their first film the coconuts its subject the Florida land boom now in 1929 the gullibility of those naive speculators was something to laugh about remarks would film these scenes and then rush to his broker to put more of his savings into the booming market on margin of course max Gordon the Broadway producer was also heavily in the market and Gordon could never get over the fact that the market was going up and up and up all the time and he said to my father how how long has this been going on Groucho and my father said I don't know but my broker down in Great Neck tells me that it's because there's a worldwide market from our canned goods and it's never gonna get down if the market will just keep going up and up and up May 1929 stock prices were going up and up with so much money to be made people were borrowing more money than ever before to buy stocks market leaders like William Durant far from being worried were ecstatic off on his annual visit to Europe he announced that everything would be fine as long as we all continue to believe confidence not halfway confidence but 100 percent confidence is the real basis for our prosperity astrologer Evangeline Adams was now putting out a newsletter her 100,000 subscribers learned how the zodiac could influence stock prices her advice for the coming summer they thought this was a ride that was never going to end every day they got more money and it counting up their paper profits and as selling and buying and buying and selling and they're doing great she's like go to get a shoeshine and they say how's the market gonna Barbican hey how's the market everybody was in the market [Music] they were people who are looking for the one lucky break people who are just hoping that if I strike it right you know they take a rifle you aimed at the ocean you hope to hit a fish along with the market temperatures saw at that summer it was a record heat wave and a record three months of the exchange some stocks doubled in value in June the New York Times index of stocks rose 52 points in July another 25 in the middle of the summer the Graf Zeppelin was completing his first leisurely trip around the world the Marx Brothers had finished shooting their film the coconuts commander bird was still at his base camp near the South Pole he too had money in the market and radioed his broker for the latest books back in Cleveland Georgia man Ruth it is 511 and on the radio they were playing the latest hit tune I'm in the market for you on August 17 Michael means brokerage firm launched a new circus one of my grandfather's innovations was putting brokerage houses on the ocean liners the first one on the Berengaria and that allowed you during the whatever it was six or seven day Passage to Europe if you were such a stock market addict that you couldn't stand the withdrawal for that period you could walk into the office in place you ordered to buy or sell 100 shares of General Motors at General Electric or whatever and they would radio that order back to New York it was being very modern at the time they were very wealthy people on the transatlantic liner ISM it gave them something to do at sea and on land everyone seemed to be making money it was a stampede of buying and major speculators like John Jacob Raskob whipped up the frenzy he told readers of The Ladies Home Journal that now everyone could be rich September 2nd Labor Day it was the hottest day of the year the markets were closed and people were at the beach a reporter checked in with astrologer Evangeline Addams to ask about the future of stock prices her answer the Dow Jones could climb to heaven the very next day September 3rd the stock market hit its all-time high my father and I had an ongoing discussion about the stock market and I you say pop everybody's getting rich but you you know you work so hard and and and you're never gonna make a nickel well you do if you keep delivering these newspapers and that's about it that the guy who's shining shoes is in a stock market the grocery clerk is in the stock market the schoolteachers in the stock market the teller at the bank is in a stock market everybody's in a stock my only only one that's not in the stock market and he used to sit back and say you'll say you'll say your thing on September 5th economists Roger Babson gave a speech to a group of businessmen sooner or later a crash is coming and it may be terrific you've been saying the same thing for two years but now for some reason investors were listening the market took a severe dip they called it the Babson break the next day prices stabilized but several days later they began to drift lower though investors had no way of knowing it the collapse had already begun in the weeks to follow the market fluctuated wildly up and down on September 12 prices dropped 10% they dip sharply again on the 20th stock markets around the world were falling too then on September 25th the market suddenly rally I remember well that I thought why is this doing this and then I thought well I'm I'm new here and these people like every day in the paper Charlie Mitchell would have something to say this JPMorgan people would have something to say about how good things were and I thought well they know a lot more about this market than I do I'm fairly new here and I really can't see why it's going up but then when they say it can't go down or if it does go down today it'll go back tomorrow yeah you think well they really are like God they they know it all and it must be the way it's going because they say so as the market floundered financial leaders were as optimistic as ever more so just five days before the crash Thomas Lamont acting head of the highly conservative Morgan Bank wrote a letter to President Hoover the future appears brilliant our securities are the most desirable in the world Charles Mitchell assured nervous investors that things have never been better practically every business leader in America and banker right around the time of 1929 saying how wonderful things were and the economy had only one way to go and I was up unfortunately he didn't have a crystal ball to predict the future these are all saying on Wall Street are the two most important the emotions are fear and greed and you go from fear to greed and about a fraction of a second so you're very very greedy and you say to yourself I want to make more and then the market goes down 10 points you get then you get frightened I want to get what I keep what I have so you sell everything and that's how you have a panic so you can't panic on the upside people rushing it to get him before the train takes off and a pedicle a downside trying to get off the train before direct disaster hits Monday October 21st Hoover along with the political and financial leaders of the country arrives in Dearborn Michigan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Edison's invention of the light bulb the host is Henry Ford the country is reminded that in 50 short years men like Ford Durant and Edison had transformed America from a third-rate power into the industrial giant of the world and while they celebrated their world was beginning to fall apart I came a Wednesday October 23rd when the market was a little shaky weak and whether this caused some spread of pessimism one doesn't know it certainly led a lot of people to think they should get out and so Thursday October the 24th the first Black Thursday the market beginning in the morning took a terrific tumble the market opened in a absolutely free fall and some people couldn't even get any bids for their shares and it was wild panic and an ugly crowd gathered outside the stock exchange and was described as me weird and threatening noises it was indeed one of the worst days that had ever been seen down there [Applause] [Music] there was a glimmer of hope on Black Thursday directly across from the New York Stock Exchange was a low stately building the house of Morgan 22 years earlier J Pierpont Morgan had stopped the panic of 1907 October 24th High Noon all eyes were now on acting head Thomas W Lamont Tom Lamar called a number of the other bankers like Charles Mitchell of the National City Bank and people from the Bankers Trust and the J hopper will we're gonna have the Chase Bank and so forth there were about a half a dozen of them there and they were gathered together to really discuss what they could do to stem this tremendous onslaught of selling stocks on the stock exchange that was taking place about 12:30 there was an announcement that this group of bankers would make available a very substantial sum to ease the credit stringency and support the market and right after that dick Whitney made his famous walk across the floor the New York Stock Exchange richard whitney vice president of the exchange was chosen by the bankers to be their representative at 1:30 in the afternoon at the height of the panic he strode across the floor and anna loud clear voice ordered ten thousand shares of US Steel at a price considerably higher than the last bid he then went from post to post shouting by orders for key stocks I'm sure enough they seem to be evidence that the bankers that moved into and the panic and it they did end it for that day the market stabilized and even what up the New York Times said that thanks to the formation of this bankers pool they've most observers felt that the panic and the great sell-off was over and most people did feel that way Todd LeMond felt that way but Monday was not good apparently people hadn't thought about things over the weekend over Sunday and decided maybe they might might be safer to get out and then the real crash which was on Tuesday well the market went down and down and down without seeming limit October 29th Morgan's bankers could no longer stem the tide it was like trying to stop Niagara Falls everyone wanted to sell AT&T down 50% RCA wants one hundred and ten dollars a share couldn't find buyers at 26 blue reads one hundred plunge to three dollars and still no buyers on the floor they had never seen anything like it well it was just like a nightmare and I couldn't believe what was going on in those days every by order was on a black head and every cell order was on a red pad and all I saw was members running around with a fistful of red orders just like chickens with their head cut off they didn't know which way to run they were panicking screaming everybody was bumping into everybody else don't remind him anyhow this is what happened and I tell you and I'm was supposed to answer everybody's yelling at me I said what am I supposed to do I may not nobody knew what the hell is William Durant the bull of the Bulls now tried single-handedly to support the market the further it plunged the more of his millions he poured into it he became truly convinced that he was Romney percent he thought that not equal really and sit him it were unfortunate the forces were too great there was no one man they could be so powerful to control the market there were some people however whose investment strategies made money on October 29th jesse Livermore's wife hearing of the crash ordered the servants to move all the furniture out of their mansion into a small cottage on the estate so when mr. Livermore got home that night he walked into a totally vacant house when she told him that she had affected the mood because she was sure that they had lost all their money he told her that he had made more money that day than he had ever made before for most others it was all over in brokers offices across the country the small investors the tailors the grocers the secretaries stared at the moving ticker in numbed silence hope of an easy retirement the new home their children's education everything was gone my father was ready to kill him so in the morning of the crash he got a call and it was max Gordon and thanks Gordon says Groucho and my father said what and Gordon said Groucho the jig is up there were all sorts of rumors and you see people going down the street looking up to see if they could catch somebody jumping out the window now it turned out there weren't as many people jumped out the window as they reported but some did and others committed suicide otherwise 500 miles from Wall Street in the Atlantic the luxury liner the Berengaria was heading home from Michael means brokerage office word spread through the ship the bottoms fallen out of the market men came running out of their Turkish bath as in towels card games ended abruptly everyone tried to challenge of the tiny office yelling sell at market they had left England wealthy men they docked in New York without a penny there's nothing unique about this this is something which happens every 20 or 30 years because that is about the length of the financial memory it's about the length of time that it requires for one look for a new set of suckers if you will a new set of people capable of wonderful self delusion to come in and imagine that they have a new and wonderful fix on the future in the 1930s charles mitchell was hounded by senate committees and the IRS the crash had left him twelve million dollars in debt this house was taken over of course and things changed and i began to know what the real world was all about it's about time i was 19 years old mitchell made a remarkable comeback he paid off his debts and died in 1955 a highly respected figure on wall street in 1936 William Durant filed for bankruptcy his only assets which he valued at 250 dollars were the clothes on his back in the late thirties the founder of General Motors tried his hand at everything from running a bowling alley to selling a cure for dandruff he died in 1947 still talking about making a comeback Herbert Hoover spent much of the early 1930s fishing he explained in a speech that fishing is a constant reminder of humility and of human frailty for all men are equal before fishes the game on Wall Street had changed a great deal forevermore and the SEC was becoming a powerful factor and the rules were changed he couldn't operate freely by himself the way he had in the past and he couldn't adapt to the new regulations so in a sense his playing where the market was over and I think a great deal of his interest in life was over at that point the game was gone in 1940 the day before Thanksgiving a photographer snapped this photograph of an old and very tired Jesse Livermore several hours later Livermore would go into a men's washroom and put a bullet through his head [Music] at the end of 1929 as they celebrated New Year's Eve all that lay in the future nobody knew that the Great Depression was coming unemployment breadlines bank failures this was unimaginable but the bubble had burst gone was that innocent optimism the confidence the illusion of wealth without work one era had ended they toasted the coming of the thirties but somewhere deep down they knew the party was over [Music] nothing but blue I do I see [Music]

Channel: Olivier Bossard on Finance

Views: 34,848

Rating: 4.8879552 out of 5

Keywords: Finance, Higher Education

Id: FAZjlxWNszw

Length: 52min 14sec (3134 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019