Andrew Ross Sorkin

The Empire State Building was born in 1929.

In fact, it was financed literally just months before all of this.

The Waldorf Astoria, Rockefeller Center was being constructed.

So it really was this sort of remarkable period.

And you can see what boom times created even today.

So Herbert Hoover arguably was probably in the best position to deal with this.

He'd actually been in Treasury at the time of the last crash, which was 1920, 1921.

But, you know, he doesn't get into office, into the White House until March 4th of 1929.

So there actually wasn't a lot of time ahead of the crash.

in October.

So there's a real question of what should have he done on the front end to have prevented the crash?

And then, of course, the question is, in the aftermath of this crash, what are the right tools to have used?

So to prevent the crash, the question is, could have they really tamped down the amount of margin that people were using?

Or had people used so much margin that had you actually

tried to stop people effectively from borrowing money to buy stocks the way they were.

And there was an attempt to do that, though quite unsuccessful.

Squeezing credit.

If you had gone to the banks and said, look, you know, if somebody walks in the brokerage and says they're going to give you a dollar, you can't give them 10.

You can give them up to three, which is, by the way, what it is basically today.

Back then, there were no rules.