Andrew Ross Sorkin

There were no what they call capital requirements.

Banks didn't have to keep a certain amount of money on hand at any given moment.

There were no insider trading laws.

So all of the sort of manipulative behavior, even the corruption that was taking place was genuinely legal, not illegal, legal.

Then you have the crash itself.

And as you described, it really is like a slow motion crash.

I think everyone has an impression that

that somehow this all happened on one day.

First of all, the crash itself actually happened over multiple days.

There's a Black Thursday, there's a Black Monday, there's a Black Tuesday.

And even then, even when the market drops effectively 50% between October and November of 1929, by the end of the year of 1929, the stock market was only down 17%.

And you might say, oh, that sounds fine.

But the truth is, because so many people were caught in the downdraft and because they had borrowed so much money, they weren't able to benefit when the stock market came back to only being down 17 percent because they already had to pay off those loans and therefore had to mortgage their homes and oftentimes sell their homes.

And that's what really sucked the first sort of domino of confidence out of the system.

Then we get to 1930.

And I think of this as sort of a successive series of dominoes of policy choices.

And President Hoover at that point decides, for example, that he wants to raise taxes.

Well, his first approach, to be honest, was to almost ignore the problem.

He didn't believe that the connection between the stock market and the real economy existed.

And that was a big miss.