CBC Digital Archives

Stock Market: Forty years after 1929's 'Black Monday'

It was in 1929 that the volatile and powerful nature of the stock market first became clear. That year's market crash and ensuing decade-long depression revealed the vital, yet fragile nature of this system, and its tremendous power over world economies. The centre of that complex web has always lain in New York City, and what happens in the U.S. has usually had direct, and sometimes disastrous effects on Canadians. The CBC Digital Archives looks back on 50 years of coverage from 1958-2008, covering the crashes, "corrections," peaks and valleys of the stock market.

On Oct. 28, 1929, Wall Street experienced that single worst day in its history. It was a day of record drops and catastrophic losses that helped plunge the world into the Great Depression. In this 1969 episode of Midday, CBC-TV looks back on "Black Monday" 40 years later, and asks if there could be another such day in the future. J. Pearce Bunting, president of the Toronto Stock Exchange, offers his forecasts for the future and Charles F.W. Burns shares his memories of Black Monday and the chaos he witnessed firsthand while working as a junior trader on Wall Street.

• On Black Monday in 1929, shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange were losing value at the rate of a million dollars per minute. Adjusted for inflation in 2008, that is equivalent to losing $12.3 million each minute.

• The great wave of suicides that is purported to have followed the 1929 crash, with stockbrokers leaping from high windows, never happened. While there were several suicides in the days surrounding the crash, there was no significant spike in the number of deaths. In his book The Great Crash: 1929, economist John Kenneth Galbraith dismisses the suicide-wave stories as "imaginary carnage."

• Suicide rates in New York City, home of Wall Street, were actually below average in the month following the crash. Just eight people committed suicide by jumping off buildings in the city between the crash and the end of 1929. Of those, only two were on Wall Street.

Medium: Television
Program: Midday
Broadcast Date: Oct. 28, 1969
Guest(s): J. Pearce Bunting, Charles F.W. Burns
Host: Warren Davis
Interviewer: Ken Cavanagh
Duration: 16:10

Last updated: February 7, 2012

Page consulted on March 25, 2013

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