The Black Tuesday Stock Market Crash on This Day in History

 

https://fee.org/resources/great-myths-of-the-great-depression/

This Day in History: Today marks the Black Tuesday of the 1929 stock market crash. It was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, when taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its aftereffects. The Great Crash is mostly associated with October 24, 1929, called Black Thursday, the day of the largest sell-off of shares in U.S. history, and October 29, 1929, called Black Tuesday, when investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. The crash, which followed the London Stock Exchange's crash of September, signaled the beginning of the Great Depression.

It is fashionable to blame the Crash on laissez-faire Capitalism and not enough Government oversight and regulation, but is that really so? 

In the year 1900 you could certainly say that the "government still approximated a minimal state, exerting minimal guidance, and commanding minimal economic regulation. But, after 1900, virtually all public policy proposals called for more extensive governmental guidance."~Floy Lilley

Consider the following partial list of government intrusions and regulations after 1900:

Bureau of Corporations (1903)

Interstate Commerce Act major amendments (1903, 1906, 1910)

Meat Inspection Act (1906)

Pure Food and Drug Act (1906)

Corporation Tax (1911)

Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1913) (Income Tax)

Federal Reserve System (1913)

Clayton Antitrust Act (1914)

Federal Trade Commission (1914)

U.S. Immigration (cut to a trickle during 1915—1920)

Adamson Act (1916) (railroad labor wage rates)

Shipping Act (1916)

National Defense Act (1916)

Army Appropriations Act (1916) (later took over railroads)

Selective Service Act (1917)

Espionage Act (1917)

Lever Act (1917) (food and fuel) (prohibited alcohol)

Overman Act (1918) (executive powers)

War Finance Corporation Act (1918)

President’s Mediation Commission (1917) (labor relations)

Federal Control Act (1918)

Sedition Act (1918)

This list does not indicate a laissez-faire economy.

"The two years, 1916—1918, witnessed an enormous and wholly unprecedented intervention of the federal government in the nation’s economic affairs. By the time of the armistice, the government had taken over the ocean shipping, railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries; commandeered hundreds of manufacturing plants; entered into massive economic enterprises on its own account in such varied departments as shipbuilding, wheat trading, and building construction; undertaken to lend huge sums to businesses directly or indirectly and to regulate the private issuance of securities; established official priorities for the use of transportation facilities, food, fuel, and many raw materials; fixed the prices of dozens of important commodities; intervened in hundreds of labor disputes; and conscripted millions of men for service in the armed forces. It had, in short, extensively distorted or wholly displaced markets, creating what some contemporaries called war socialism."~Floy Lilley

It has also been reported that there was a rash of suicides and window-jumpers during the 1929 stock market crash, but that is false as well. 

“In the United States the suicide wave that followed the stock market crash is also part of the legend of 1929. In fact, there was none.” ~John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929.

See also The History of Money & Economics, 250 PDF Books on DVDrom