It’s a staple of the single panel comic: the stockbroker, wiped out by the crash of 29, climbing onto the ledge outside their office window and jumping away from their problems.
How many stockbrokers actually did this? I figure there must have been at least one, perhaps two or three, that did. Otherwise, where did the stereotype come from?
Manny is a stockbroker and I used to be one in a previous life. Stockbrokers place buy and sell orders for clients. Very few have all their own assets in the market. So I doubt that many (if any) stockbrokers jumped out of windows.
Here’s what I found at:
http://www.letsfindout.com/subjects/america/stock.html
Black Thursday: The 1929 Stock Market Crash
On Tuesday, October 29th, Wall Street’s New York Stock Exchange experienced an unprecedented wave of panic selling of stocks. An earlier sell-off on the previous Thursday, “Black Thursday,” combined with Tuesday’s sales led to a collapse in stock prices and the loss of many American fortunes.
A few investors who lost all their money jumped to their deaths from office buildings. Others gathered in the streets outside the Stock Exchange to learn how much they lost.
The Great Crash marked a turning point between the optimism of the 1920s, the Roaring Twenties, and the pessimism of the 1930s, the period of the Great Depression.
After the crash, the American economy was a dead beast with many banks failing, as people ran to them to withdraw their savings. Without Federal Deposit Insurance, nonexistent then, many hardworking people lost all the money they had deposited into the bank.
Fear gripped the nation. The stock market crash was the biggest enemy the American people had to fight, while working their way back to economic health.
Well, according to this site http://www.history.utoledo.edu/notes/1040/GRDEPR.html
The US Suicide rate soared by 1/3 between 1928 and 1932.
So I can definately understand the perception that you couldn’t walk down Wall St. with out keeping an eye on the ledges above.
Then how many were pushed?
OK, maybe the stereotype is (or should be) really that of speculators. At any rate, does anyone know how many actually jump as a direct result of the crash?
I know that some of you hate resurrected old threads.
But I also know that when someone starts a repeat thread everbody in the cheap seats stands up, throws peanut shells and yells “Use the Search function, moron!”
So I’m bringing this baby back to life… but for good reason. I’m writing a little feature about NYC and the '29 Stock Market crash, and I’d love to confirm or debunk the cliche of the concrete swan divers of '29.
There were a lot of good nibbles in the old posts, but nothing very definative. Anybody got any better details/statistics/links than have already been posted?
Thanks all.