Credit! Credit! Credit!
It's like a mantra. Everyone had stocks in their name but it was mostly the banks that held the stock. A person buying stock in 1929 only had to put up 10% of the price of the stock. The bank held the other 90%
Can you imagine that? Alarm bells should be going off in your head. The banks were way over their heads with debt that wasn't theirs.
And what would the banks do should the market begin to fall? They could try selling the stock, but who would buy it? That only brought the price down lower until someone thought they were getting a stock at a reasonable price.
But the market was acting like it had an anvil attached to it and it kept on falling. And soon the person that bought the stock was looking for another person to buy it from him so he could get out.
That was a major problem that resolved itself by means of a depression.
Because the land was horribly treated, agriculture became an occupation that was neither safe not sustainable. Many farms were lost because the soil couldn't produce. The banks again had another problem. They had loaned out millions of dollars using land has collateral. The banks could foreclose but what does a bank do with land? Or cattle? Or horses? And if the bank tried to hang on, prices were so low for agricultural products that people could not make enough to make payments.
Meantime in the cities, was it any better? No! Twenty five % of the workforce was unemployed. Could they buy the cars Ford was rolling off the assembly lines? Who needed Edison light bulbs when those factory workers were living in tents?
