Happy Anniversary, Black Tuesday!

Today’s the 79th anniversary of the infamous Black Tuesday, one of three days in which Wall Street crashed. Many people mark the Crash of 1929 as the official beginning of the Great Depression.

It’s interesting to note that on Black Tuesday, the market lost about $14 billion in value (a chump change when compared to the $700 billion bailout package of 2008) and the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost only 30.57 points (a bit percentage though: about 12%).

People who thought that this drop in price was a buying opportunity would be in for a rude surprise: stock values bounced back a little but then continued its slide for several years. The bottom was reached about two and a half years later; by then the Dow had lost almost 90% of its value from before the crash.

Obviously the stock market recovered from the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression – but it took almost 25 years for it to do so.

Read more about it on Neatorama’s 10 American Financial Meltdowns in the Past Century