"Oh, they jumped out of buildings. Look, I don't tell the story in the book, but the truth is, my grandfather, who's no longer alive, Sidney Sorkin was 11 years old during this period. His older brother was a messenger boy down on Wall Street. And in October of 1929, he used to tell a story about how he had gone down there and was working with his brother to make a little bit of extra money."
"In the days after the crash, he watched somebody jump out of a window and kill himself. And for the rest of his 91 years on this planet Earth, he never bought a share of stock. I mean, that was sort of the generational scarring psychologically, I think, that a lot of people had during that period because he watched so many people, family members and others, who lost everything, and saw this gentleman jump out of a window in front of him."
The 1929 stock market crash unfolded over several days and produced acute financial devastation across socioeconomic lines. Newspapers emphasized dramatic suicides, and many witnesses reported people jumping from buildings, producing deep psychological scars. Personal testimony shows survivors and family members sometimes avoided stocks for life as a result of that trauma. Rapid leverage and speculative behavior amplified market fragility and losses. Contemporary data complicates the popular belief that suicide rates uniformly spiked after the crash, even though many individual tragedies were reported. Parallels are drawn between 1929 speculative excess and risk patterns in modern, technology-driven markets.
Read at Slate Magazine
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