29 October 1929 : The Wall Street Crash initiates the Great Depression

An unstable world economy reaches its breaking point as investors on Wall Street trade 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, and the stock ticker ran several hours behind because of the furious level of trading. Among other causes, the collapse was brought on by a period of wild speculation, the proliferation of debt, and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, the industrialised world spiralled into the Great Depression. A decade of epidemic unemployment, bread lines and demonstrations for social revolution followed