Historians and economists debate the importance of the Great Crash. On 13 November 1929, yet another disastrous day for the markets, he put his family’s money behind a guarantee that his enterprise’s shares would not fall below 50. Rockefeller, the Bill Gates of his day, was caught up in the turmoil.
Shareholders in International Nickel and Imperial Oil lost more than $500 million each, those in Canadian Pacific Railway over $60 million. The setbacks returned and they persisted.įrom the peak of the bull market in 1929 to mid-1930, the 50 most active Canadian stocks diminished on average to well under half their market value. The markets jumped back to life, but briefly. “The singular feature of the great crash of 1929 was that the worst continued to worsen,” wrote Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his seminal book The Great Crash 1929 (1954). The Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs reckoned that “never before the 1929 crash had amounts that ran into billions of dollars been lost on the Canadian Stock Exchanges in so brief a period of time.” In Montréal, some 500,000 shares were sold (5 times the usual amount) in Toronto, 330,000 were sold (13 times the usual). Horrified investors clogged the financial districts, while employees in the exchanges and the brokerage houses worked themselves to near-collapse in an attempt to corral the paperwork. In Toronto and Montréal, liquidation records were set. The New York Times industrial average plummeted, eliminating a strong year’s gains, and the investment giant Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation was reduced to 58 per cent of its worth the night before.Ĭredit: Library and Archives Canada/C-020594.\r\n On Wall Street, 16.4 million shares were sold, almost 4 million more than Black Thursday’s unprecedented totals. Tuesday, 29 October - or Black Tuesday - was worse still.
“The biggest crash ever recorded,” lamented the famed British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose own investments were entirely gone by the end of the year ( see Keynesian Economics).
In Montréal, forced selling ran rampant, and practically every stock finished the day down. The dread extended to the Toronto markets, the Globe declared, and “rocked” share prices there. Thousands of accounts were wiped out before leading bankers and industrialists intervened to halt the slump. The New York Stock Exchange, the accompanying stories reported, had experienced massive declines in wild trading, with a record 12.8 million shares sold. “Stock Speculators Shaken in Wild Day of Panic,” shouted the front page of the next day’s Toronto Globe. It began to take shape on 24 October 1929, Black Thursday. The wheat glut of 1928 threw the Winnipeg Grain Exchange into a spiral, triggering a depression in Canada's economy.
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