The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout.
The Roaring Twenties, the decade that led up to the Crash, was a time of wealth and excess, and despite caution of the dangers of speculation, many believed that the market could sustain high price levels. Shortly before the crash, economist Irving Fisher famously proclaimed, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” However, the optimism and financial gains of the great bull market were shattered on “Black Tuesday”, October 29, 1929, when share prices on the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) collapsed. Stock prices fell on that day and they continued to fall, at an unprecedented rate, for a full month.
The October 1929 crash came during a period of declining real estate values in the United States (which peaked in 1925)[citation needed] near the beginning of a chain of events that led to the Great Depression, a period of economic decline in the industrialized nations.
In the days leading up to “Black Thursday” (called “Black Friday” in Europe due to the time difference), the market was severely unstable. Periods of selling and high volumes of trading were interspersed with brief periods of rising prices and recovery. Economist and author Jude Wanniski later correlated these swings with the prospects for passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which was then being debated in Congress.[8] After the crash, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) partially recovered in November-December 1929 and early 1930, only to reverse and crash again, reaching a low point of the great bear market in 1932. On July 8, 1932 the Dow reached its lowest level of the 20th century and did not return to pre-1929 levels until November 1954.