The Wall Street Crash never ceases to fascinate
When Winston Churchill dined with the crème de la crème of American finance in New York on 28 October 1929, a facetious toast was made to ‘friends and former millionaires’. Despite a 13 per cent drop in the Dow after another day of market turmoil, the assembled banking titans felt they wouldn’t just survive the maelstrom, they would make more money from it. Churchill, whose finances were perennially chaotic, had caught stock market fever and lost today’s equivalent of almost $1.5 million. On returning to England, he declared the Wall Street crash ‘only a passing episode in the march of a valiant and serviceable people’. In the end, US stocks
