Andrew Ross Sorkin

And it was just so emblematic and indicative of the hysteria and the mania around the stock market and how it had touched so many people's lives in the late 1920s.

This was really the first time in America that ordinary Americans were playing the market.

They were participating in

and investing in this entire new world.

And in that unique moment, the market was dropping and dropping precipitously.

This is literally at the epicenter in October of 1929 as it was falling.

Exactly.

In part because they're watching the market drop and they want to know, should I buy?

Should I sell?

What should I do?

And the truth is, at that moment.

Most people had bad information, which is to say that the prices of the stocks that they were even seeing on the tickers were so out of date, out of time, they were wrong.

They were oftentimes three, four, five, seven hours behind the actual trading that was happening on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange that people didn't know in that moment what to do.

Oh, my goodness.

I mean, the same way we have Starbucks on the corner of every street now, we had brokerages popping up on the corners of streets all across America, especially in the big cities.

And you could walk into one of these brokerage houses and literally, if you wanted to put down a dollar of your own money – and this was really the major shift – they would not just take your dollar, but they would then lend you $10 against your dollar to go buy stock.

So for every dollar you were putting down –

they were oftentimes lending you 10 times that so you could buy into the market.

And so long as the market was going up and for a period of time from the beginning of 1928, for example, to the fall of 1929, the stock market was up some 90%.

It felt like free money for most Americans.