1929: The Great Crash
Saturday 24 January
9:00pm – 10:00pm
BBC2
In 1929 Groucho Marx, a sceptical investor who had nonetheless put all his savings in the booming stock market, went to see his broker and asked in amazement how it was that share prices kept going up and up. His broker placated him with reassuring words about the new worldwide market and Marx continued to invest. In the crash that followed that October he lost everything he’d earned from his films. Like the rest of this programme, it’s a salutary tale with thumping reminders of the present woes in the economy. The programme only has to walk us patiently through the history of the crash and the parallels fairly scream at you, although the markets of the 1920s were, it seems, more corrupt: “It was a big casino,” recalls one contributor “and it was rigged by professional investors.” The really gloomy part of the story is the ending: that a crash led to a depression, which ultimately led to war.
