The Banker Who Bet Against His Own Bank: The 1929 Wall Street Crash

On Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, America's most powerful bankers met at J.P. Morgan and pooled their money to stop the panic on Wall Street. One of them, the head of Chase, had been secretly betting for a month that his own bank's shares would fall. He made more than four million dollars. This is the real story of the 1929 Wall Street crash: the borrowed money that drove the boom, the pools that pushed up prices, the economist who saw a "permanently high plateau", the two days the market lost nearly a quarter of its value, the bank panics that turned a crash into the Great Depression, and the Senate investigation that finally revealed who had been running the show. Chapters 0:00 Black Thursday, J.P. Morgan, noon 1:53 Part I: Borrowed money 6:43 Part II: The plateau 9:21 Part III: Black Thursday 12:50 Part IV: The long fall 16:43 Part V: The reckoning 22:21 The end: who should pay? Sources U.S. Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, "Stock Exchange Practices" (Report No. 1455, 1934): https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/d... Federal Reserve History, "Stock Market Crash of 1929" and "The Great Depression": https://www.federalreservehistory.org... Herbert Hoover, Statement on the National Business and Economic Situation, October 25, 1929 (American Presidency Project) M. Friedman & A. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (1963) C. Romer, "The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression", Quarterly Journal of Economics (1990) J. K. Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (1955) FDIC, A Brief History of Deposit Insurance Images: public domain archives from the Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons and the Federal Reserve's FRASER library. Charts made from the Senate report and Federal Reserve data. Who was really to blame for the crash: the people who borrowed to buy stocks, or the banks and companies that lent them the money? Tell me in the comments, I read every one. The Price of History tells the story of the money behind history: empires, wars, crashes and fortunes. New videos every Monday and Thursday. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. #1929 #stockmarketcrash #economichistory