On Black Tuesday, panicked investors dumped 16.4 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange, a record that stood for nearly forty years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost about 12 percent in a single session, capping a week of collapse that erased billions in paper wealth. The crash did not single-handedly cause the Great Depression, but it shattered confidence and triggered a decade of global economic misery.
Ticker tape machines could not keep pace with the volume of sell orders, running hours behind actual trades so that no one on the floor truly knew how bad things were until well after the closing bell. Traders wept openly on the exchange floor, and rumors spread of Wall Street bankers leaping from windows, though most such stories were later shown to be exaggerated or invented.
Just five days earlier, on Black Thursday, a group of powerful bankers had pooled funds to prop up the market, briefly restoring calm. That intervention failed to hold. By Tuesday the selling became a stampede, with US Steel, General Electric, and other blue-chip stocks losing a third or more of their value in hours.
The crash wiped out an estimated $14 billion in a single day and roughly $30 billion over the course of the week, sums that dwarfed the entire US federal budget at the time. Banks failed by the thousands in the following years, unemployment eventually reached 25 percent, and the psychological scar on American investors lasted for a generation.