Black Tuesday
Categories: Econ, Trading, Education, Metrics, Ethics/Morals, Regulations
Black Tuesday: when Black Friday moves all the way back to Tuesday as retail competition causes stores to start the clock on the best deals of the year even earlier.
Eh, okay. Black Tuesday is pretty much the opposite of modern-day Black Friday, since it helped kick off the Great Depression of the 1930s. On Tuesday, October 29th 1929, a panic sell-off in the stock market led the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plummet 12%. Black Tuesday happened after Black Thursday (the market fell 11%) and Black Monday (the market fell 13%). Oof.
How did this happen? Basically, the Roaring ‘20s was a fun party, and the Great Depression was the ugly hangover. The Roaring ‘20s after WWI led to a period of economic optimism. People were spending, and stock prices soared, as people celebrated WWI as the war that ended all wars.
That optimism started to fade as consumers were hit with the reality check of growing debt from houses and cars in mid-1929. European competition in commodities pushed prices lower, consumers started purchasing less, and the economy started flat-lining. As people started to sell, more and more started to jump ship.