Who Paid for the Crash of 1929? Follow the $8.5 Billion in Loans

Wall Street, October 1929. In its November issue, the Federal Reserve Bulletin printed the month's tally: lenders that weren't banks, corporations and lenders abroad, pulled $2 billion out of loans to brokers in a single month. In September those broker loans had passed $8.5 billion, more than all the currency then circulating in the United States. So who actually paid the bill? Was it the lenders who called their money home, the brokers who passed the call along, the small investors who had bought stock with two-thirds of it on credit, or people who had never borrowed a dollar? This documentary follows one bill from its call in 1929 to the last entry on record. Along the way: a bid for a steel stock that two histories count two different ways, a line in the Bulletin showing who was repaid first, a bank chief's 1933 Senate testimony, a bank chairman who sold his own bank's stock short, a federal provision named for one man, a stock exchange president in handcuffs at Grand Central Terminal, and a country estate sold in 1940 for less than two percent of its cost. Built from period photographs, newsreel film, Senate hearing records and the pages of the 1929 Federal Reserve Bulletin. 📌 Chapters 0:00 Intro 4:05 Twenty-Five Million in March 8:33 The Meeting at Twenty-Three Wall Street 12:20 Sixty-Eight Points in Two Days 14:55 Repaid First 17:22 Depositors at the End of the Line 19:39 Under Oath 23:49 A Law With His Name 27:51 The Same Question, Every Month Which moment hit you hardest: the call money, the Senate hearings or the handcuffs at Grand Central? Tell us in the comments. — Archive footage and photographs: Coverr, Magnific, Storyblocks, Wikimedia Commons, YouTube. Licensed stock: Pixabay (illustrative; it does not show the people named). Some scenes are illustrative AI-generated reconstructions; they are not archive images. Creative Commons attributions: CC BY 2.0: FDR Presidential Library & Museum, Forsaken Fotos from , Maryland, Steve Shook from Moscow, Idaho, USA CC BY 4.0: NateBergin CC BY-SA 3.0: Anonimski, MikeJiroch, NortonJuster7722 CC BY-SA 4.0: Awise107, Beyond My Ken, Car396, Epicgenius, She lied, Cal., Tdorante10 Licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Music: Original music composed for INTEREST DUE (Suno). #Crashof1929 #GreatDepression #FinancialHistory