Wall Street Crash of 1929
Black Thursday panic hits the New York Stock Exchange before a bankers' intervention
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The Dow plunged about 11% during the day — then finished only about 2% down, after a banker walked onto the floor and bid $205 for 10,000 shares of U.S. Steel.
24 October 1929: selling from the opening bell
Heavy selling struck the New York Stock Exchange as soon as trading opened on 24 October 1929, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 11% intraday.
A record 12,894,650 shares changed hands, overwhelming the ticker system and leaving traders unable to tell what current prices actually were.
The rescue, staged to be seen
A group of prominent New York bankers assembled a support pool and sent NYSE vice-president Richard Whitney onto the floor to make conspicuous purchases of leading shares. Whitney bid for 10,000 shares of U.S. Steel at $205 — the price of its previous sale, above the market's current bids — so that organised support would be impossible to miss.
The intervention reversed most of the day's plunge: the Dow closed approximately 2% lower rather than 11%.
One afternoon of confidence
The distinction matters because the famous figures belong to other days. The near-13% and near-12% closing collapses came on Black Monday, 28 October, and Black Tuesday, 29 October.
The stabilisation on the 24th held for a single afternoon; the much larger closing declines arrived the following Monday and Tuesday.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 3 audit passes
How this was checked
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What the sources leave uncertain
- The date and broad sequence are secure.
- Sources sometimes say the market “fell 11% on Black Thursday” without distinguishing its intraday low from its closing result. The scholarly Economic History Review account makes that distinction.
- Dollar estimates of paper wealth destroyed vary with the index, securities and date range used; no $30 billion figure should be assigned to October 24 alone without a defined methodology.