Crash of 1929
The sharp fall in the share prices quoted on the New York stock exchange, that came to be known as the crash of 2009, started shortly after the downturn in American economic activity known as the great depression, and is believed to have contributed to its severity. The fall continued until the begining of the recovery in economic activity in 1933, by which time average prices had shrunk to no more than 15 per cent of their 1929 peak.
The once popular view that categorised the crash as the bursting of a speculative "bubble" has since been replaced by a consensus among economists that it was the consequence of mistaken monetary policies.
The stock exchange crash
The crash marked the end of a period of eight increasingly prosperous years, known as the "roaring twenties": a period of above-average growth of national income, exceptionally rapid growth in corporate earnings, and even more rapid growth in stock exchange prices. That trend intensified in the latter years, with stock prices rising from about 10 times corporate earnings in 1928 to 15 times or more in 1929. Then, in the June of 1929, industrial activity began a decline [1] that continued throughout the rest of the year, and, in a few days in the autumn of 1929, the average share price on the New York stock exchange dropped by a staggering 30 per cent.
There have been many day-by-day accounts of that dramatic occurrence, noteably that of John Kenneth Galbraith [2]. The savings of a great number of people, including the eminent as well as the unknown, were lost, and there were calls for the reform of the financial system that led to the setting up of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
What followed in the ensuing years was the result of mutual interactions between the behaviour of investors on the stock exchange and the economic downturn; and its eventual outcome was the loss by 1933 of about 90 per cent of the former value of United States equities [3].
Explanations
It is generally agreed that at investors were unaware of the preceding downturn in industrial activity at the time of the initial crash, but that awareness of it in subsequent years must have contributed to the continuing fall in prices. What is not generally agreed upon is the cause of the initial crash. The conventional explanation has, for many years, been that it was caused by the bursting of a speculative bubble, implying that stocks were priced above their real value in 1929 [2][4]. Evidence to the contrary has since emerged [5], and Federal Reserve Board Chairman (and author of scholarly works on the period) Ben Bernanke has endorsed the conclusion that the crash was not the consequence of speculation [6].
Consequences
Remedies
References
- ↑ Geoffrey Moore and Julius Sishkin Indicators of Business Contractions and Expansions page 25 National Bureau of Economic Research Occasional Paper 103, 1967 [1]
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 John Kenneth Galbraith: The Great Crash 1929, Penguin Books 1992
- ↑ For more detail about what developed, see the Timelines subpage
- ↑ see the summary of Galbraith' analysis on the Tutorials subpage
- ↑ Ellen McGrattan: The Stock Market Crash of 1929: Irving Fisher Was Right!, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Research Department Staff Report 294, December 2001[[2]]
- ↑ Ben Bernanke: Asset-Price "Bubbles" and Monetary Policy, speech at the New York Chapter of the National Association for Business Economics, October 15, 2002[3]