Matthew Josephson

Beginning on Monday, October 21, 1929, prices on the stock exchange began to drop. For eight days panicked sellers inundated the stock exchange in a frenzy of selling. There were so many sale orders that the ticker tape machines could not keep up with the volume. Matthew Josephson was a stockbroker in the twenties. He witnessed the crash on Wall Street firsthand. The following excerpt is taken from his biographical book, which describes the crash and the measures the big bankers employed trying to stabilize the market.

One is led to believe that nobody, or almost nobody, saw what was coming. The summer of 1929 was a season of euphoria in the financial world, although reports of declining factory output, automobile sales, and railway freight traffic were coming in as warning signals. The high Reserve Bank money rate was also a traditional signal...