Crowds gathering near the New York Stock Exchange on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, which marked the beginning of the Great Depression (Associated Press/Wikimedia Commons)
It was 96 years ago, in October 1929, that the Great Depression got underway with an historically severe Wall Street crash. Between "Black Thursday" (October 24, 1929) and "Black Tuesday" (October 29, 1929), a record 29.3 million stock shares were dumped in massive selloffs on the New York Stock Exchange.
Many economists, both left and right, believe that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, signed into law by President Herbert Hoover, made the financial crisis even worse. And when homelessness soared in 1930 and 1931, growing numbers of shantytowns or homeless camps were dubbed "Hoovervilles." The Great Depression became the #1 issue, hands down, in the 1932 presidential election, which found Hoover being voted out office in a landslide victory for liberal Democratic nominee Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In addition to winning a whopping 472 electoral votes, FDR won the popular vote by roughly 18 percent.
In an article published by Vanity Fair on October 13, journalist Natalie Korach focuses on the economic analysis of CNBC host and New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin — who sees some disturbing parallels between Trump's second presidency and 1929 under Hoover. Sorkin has written books on two economic crises: the newly released "1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History — and How It Shattered a Nation" and 2009's "Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves."
"On a snowy day in January," Korach explains, "BlackRock CEO Larry Fink joined Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC's 'Squawk Box' for an interview in Davos, Switzerland, where corporate and political leaders gather for the annual World Economic Forum. While the segment mainly revolved around the BlackRock CEO's plea for Donald Trump's SEC to make it harder for activist shareholders to take on corporations via proxy vote, Sorkin couldn't resist asking for Fink's take on the booming cryptocurrency ecosystem…. At the time, Sorkin was finishing his latest book, '1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History — And How It Shattered a Nation,' an extensive account of how Wall Street and the U.S. government dragged the country into the Great Depression."
Korach continues, "Several months later, over a late-summer coffee, Sorkin and I are discussing the history of the economic collapse and the book itself, in which the parallels to today exist almost down to the person…. I ask whether the popular 1920s-era stock-pooling practice among Wall Street insiders — where powerful investors combined their resources and artificially ran up the stock price of a given company — bore any similarity to modern-day meme stocks, as online communities drive stock purchases, leading to rapid price oscillation."
Sorkin responded, "Completely," noting parallels between the cryptocurrency and meme stock markets of 2025 and Wall Street in 1929.
"If the question is whether the U.S. is walking into another financial crisis like 1929 and the Great Depression," Korach reports, "Sorkin isn’t ready to draw that conclusion. Most financial crises are a function of debt and too much leverage in the markets, he continues, 'and part of the problem is we don't know whether there is, because so much of the leverage in the system is now in sort of the shadow banking system.' The events of 1929 should serve as a warning — not that we are necessarily on the cusp of a financial crisis of that magnitude, Sorkin argues, but that if lessons aren't learned, 'we could go down the same road.'"
Read Natalie Korach's full article for Vanity Fair at this link.