Wall Street Crash of 1929 - analysis The rising share prices encouraged more people to invest on the hope that share prices would rise further. Speculation thus fueled further rises and created an economic bubble. Because of margin buying, investors stood to lose large sums of money if the market turned down or even if it failed to advance quickly enough. The average price to earnings ratio of S&P Composite stocks was 32.6 in September 1929,[37] clearly above historical norms.[38] According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the exuberance also resulted in a large number of people placing their savings and money in leverage investment products like Goldman Sachs's "Blue Ridge trust" and "Shenandoah Trust", which crashed in 1929 as well, resulting in losses to banks of $475 billion in 2010 dollars ($663.68 billion in 2023).[39] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929#United_States
[37] "Irrational exuberance is not that crazy. The once-popular terms speculative mania or speculative orgy seemed too strong to describe what we were going through in the 1990s. It was more like the kind of bad judgment we all remember having made at some point in our lives when our enthusiasm got the best of us." https://web.archive.org/web/20070101032943/http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7922.html
