day of the market's upheaval, whose prices, even at their lowest of
last Thursday, now look high by comparison ...
To most of those who have been in the market it is all the more awe-
inspiring because their financial history is limited to bull
markets."
Overseas - mainly European - selling was an important factor. Some
conspiracy theorists, such as Webster Tarpley in his "British
Financial Warfare", supported by contemporary reporting by the likes
of "The Economist", went as far as writing:
"When this Wall Street Bubble had reached gargantuan proportions in
the autumn of 1929, (Lord) Montagu Norman (governor of the Bank of
England 1920-1944) sharply (upped) the British bank rate,
repatriating British hot money, and pulling the rug out from under
the Wall Street speculators, thus deliberately and consciously
imploding the US markets. This caused a violent depression in the
United States and some other countries, with the collapse of
financial markets and the contraction of production and employment.
In 1929, Norman engineered a collapse by puncturing the bubble."
The crash was, in large part, a reaction to a sharp reversal,
starting in 1928, of the reflationary, "cheap money", policies of
the Fed intended, as Adolph Miller of the Fed's Board of Governors
told a Senate committee, "to bring down money rates, the call rate
among them, because of the international importance the call rate
had come to acquire. The purpose was to start an outflow of gold -
to reverse the previous inflow of gold into this country (back to
Britain)." But the Fed had already lost control of the speculative
rush.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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