... in that this documentary, part of the American Experience series on PBS, looks at the entire year of 1929, including popular culture of the time, the American mindset of what the future looked like, and how the titans of The Gilded Age could manipulate the market with absolutely no compunction because what they were doing was not illegal. There was virtually no regulation of the stock market whatsoever.
It starts out on January 1, 1929 and ends on December 31, 1929, and examines how one could see rumblings of a stock market crash coming as soon as March of that year. Irrational exuberance combined with the fact that people could buy stock on margin - 10% down - with the catch being if that stock dropped below 90% of its purchase price you had to cough up more money or you were sold out at whatever price the broker could get for your holdings.
The piece talks about the invention of so many helpful common items and the fact that so many useful things were available for the first time to many Americans during the 1920s - autos, refrigerators, washing machines, toasters. And this was the first time average Americans could buy more expensive items on credit. So buying stock on credit did not seem that unusual. Apparently, believing an astrologist with zero economics training (Evangeline Adams) and her perennially sunny stock market predictions did not seem unusual either.
One really interesting aspect of this documentary is that it talks about all of the very wealthy people involved in stock market speculation including William Durant, founder of GM, Charles Mitchell, the man who popularized stock ownership for the "little guy" and Jesse Livermore, a veteran Wall Street trader. Groucho Marx even owns a piece of this tale. And first degree relatives of these people were still alive, ambulatory, and lucid and could talk about them in detail.
I've never seen a documentary with such a fetching sound track - "Blue Skies", "Hitting The Ceiling", "Puttin' On the Ritz", and "If You Want the Rainbow" are among the standards played. And maybe an irony lost on the makers of this film since this was not its subject - "Blue Skies" being played with a very fast still of a smiling Roscoe Arbuckle looking skyward. The 20s were anything but roaring for Arbuckle - falsely accused of assault and murder in 1921 he was tried three times before being acquitted with the jury actually issuing an apology. But Hollywood chewed him up and spit him out anyways and his career was over. But I digress.
A very interesting film which I found a great double bill with "Panic: The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis ", in which the whole thing almost happened all over again.
It starts out on January 1, 1929 and ends on December 31, 1929, and examines how one could see rumblings of a stock market crash coming as soon as March of that year. Irrational exuberance combined with the fact that people could buy stock on margin - 10% down - with the catch being if that stock dropped below 90% of its purchase price you had to cough up more money or you were sold out at whatever price the broker could get for your holdings.
The piece talks about the invention of so many helpful common items and the fact that so many useful things were available for the first time to many Americans during the 1920s - autos, refrigerators, washing machines, toasters. And this was the first time average Americans could buy more expensive items on credit. So buying stock on credit did not seem that unusual. Apparently, believing an astrologist with zero economics training (Evangeline Adams) and her perennially sunny stock market predictions did not seem unusual either.
One really interesting aspect of this documentary is that it talks about all of the very wealthy people involved in stock market speculation including William Durant, founder of GM, Charles Mitchell, the man who popularized stock ownership for the "little guy" and Jesse Livermore, a veteran Wall Street trader. Groucho Marx even owns a piece of this tale. And first degree relatives of these people were still alive, ambulatory, and lucid and could talk about them in detail.
I've never seen a documentary with such a fetching sound track - "Blue Skies", "Hitting The Ceiling", "Puttin' On the Ritz", and "If You Want the Rainbow" are among the standards played. And maybe an irony lost on the makers of this film since this was not its subject - "Blue Skies" being played with a very fast still of a smiling Roscoe Arbuckle looking skyward. The 20s were anything but roaring for Arbuckle - falsely accused of assault and murder in 1921 he was tried three times before being acquitted with the jury actually issuing an apology. But Hollywood chewed him up and spit him out anyways and his career was over. But I digress.
A very interesting film which I found a great double bill with "Panic: The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis ", in which the whole thing almost happened all over again.
