Debt is the almost singular through line behind every major financial crisis.

October 14, 2025, 6 AM ET

Charles Mitchell strode up the steps of 55 Wall Street, determined to project his usual sense of confidence and certitude. It had been a crushing afternoon. As he returned to his office, he knew that the eyes of New York were on him—everyone from the traders in the street to his own secretary was assessing his gait and searching his face, trying to read meaning in every twitch, every line, every wrinkle.

In his gray three‑piece suit, shoulders back, Mitchell kept up his smile as he passed through the glass‑domed central hall of his National City Bank. The bank, with its 83‑foot ceiling and two solid-bronze doors protecting a safe weighing some 300 tons, was the largest in the country.

It was just past 5:30 p.m. on Monday, October 28, 1929. Hours earlier, the stock market had closed with a sharp, dizzying drop of 13 percent. After a week of downward convulsions, it was by far the greatest fall. The darkening downtown streets still teemed with anxious brokers in their fedoras and flatcaps, messenger boys and switchboard girls, all gossiping and speculating about the collapse. What caused the fall? How much further might it go tomorrow? Would the markets even open?

This article was adapted from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—And How It Shattered a Nation.

As Mitchell made his way to his office, the teller windows he passed reflected the weary puffiness under his eyes and his disheveled, graying eyebrows. He collapsed into the chair behind his mahogany desk. The room was furnished with the high formality befitting an 18th‑century statesman, including antique wood chairs and a grandfather clock that stood against the cream‑white woodwork. The clock was flanked by portraits of George Washington orchestrating the newly independent nation with the sort of purpose and resolve that Mitchell sought to emulate in his own life.

The athletic 52‑year‑old bank chairman—an unusually optimistic man whom the press called “Sunshine Charlie”—had spent the afternoon in emergency meetings at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, puzzling over how to calm the market. It was a moment for which a self‑consciously Great Man such as Mitchell should have been utterly prepared. He had the experience, the stature, and the steely nerves necessary to steer Wall Street through these tough times. Yet he felt exposed, vulnerable.

But he didn’t have time to consider his emotional state. He walked upstairs to confer with Hugh Baker, who ran National City’s stock‑trading unit. Baker, a tall, bald man with piercing eyes, began to explain to Mitchell, calmly, if somewhat obliquely, what had taken place while Mitchell had been at the Federal Reserve.

“Our portfolio today has been tremendously increased in our holdings of National City Bank stock,” Baker told him.

Mitchell stared at him, waiting to hear exactly what he meant.

Baker finally blurted out: “We purchased 70‑odd thousand shares.”

Mitchell, who could calculate numbers instantly in his head, immediately grasped the nature and scale of the problem. That is unbelievable, he thought. The bank didn’t have the cash to pay for so many shares. He was outraged—and terrified. Everything he had built was suddenly at grave risk of collapse.

Nearly a century has passed since the crash of 1929, yet it remains the most significant—and largely misunderstood—financial disaster in modern history. Today’s public may have a vague conception of what took place then, but few have any sense of the individuals who played a role in this drama, what they did to precipitate the crisis, why they failed to see it coming, and what steps they took to try to end it. Nor, more important, do they perceive the remarkable parallels between that era and today’s political and economic climate.

The 1920s, more than any other period in our country’s history, saw the birth of the modern consumer economy that we take for granted today. As millions of Americans left farms and small towns and followed higher-paying jobs to metropolitan areas, they created markets for astonishing new conveniences and goods. They bought cars, radios, and dishwashers—products that nobody had known they needed but that made life much easier and more enjoyable.

But the greatest product, the one that made all the others possible, was credit. Buy now, pay later. It was a kind of magic.

In 1919, General Motors struck a blow against the American taboo of taking personal loans by starting to sell its vehicles on credit. Soon after, Sears, Roebuck & Co. offered “installment plans” for expensive appliances, and later for more everyday items. Taking notice of this cultural shift, banks mechanized the process for smaller merchants. Wall Street, led by Mitchell, went one step further and started offering stock on credit—“on margin,” it was called. By the thousands, middle‑class Americans opened margin accounts, putting up 10 or 20 percent of a stock purchase and borrowing the rest. When the market went up, the returns felt like free money.

Americans no longer had to save for the goods they wanted. Borrowing became a habit, an expression of optimism. So long as faith in tomorrow was maintained, debts could be rolled over endlessly into the future.

Some individuals became spectacularly rich. The wealthiest amassed fortunes in excess of $100 million, which, in today’s dollars, would be nearly $2 billion. Some of the most senior executives of America’s biggest companies had salaries and bonuses of $2 million to $3 million annually, the equivalent of $37 million to $56 million today.

And with that wealth came fame. It was, arguably, the first true celebrity age: a mass‑produced, media‑driven obsession with individuals for not just their talent or achievements but for their sheer visibility. And the spotlight included not just artists or athletes—but men of wealth. Hollywood stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Clara Bow, and Douglas Fairbanks still drew headlines, as did Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh. But for the first time, businessmen joined their ranks. In an era that equated fortunes with brilliance, the titans of Wall Street and industry became household names. Magazines such as Time, which started in 1923, and Forbes, which began in 1917, turned financiers into cover stars. Their salaries were scrutinized, their pronouncements quoted like scripture. The richest men in America were cast as visionaries: symbols of success in a nation enthralled by it.

In hindsight, the heady 1920s disguised a set of underlying imbalances, a massive bifurcation of American society. As technology made farming more efficient and less dependent on physical labor, huge numbers of farmworkers fell into economic distress, along with the towns they lived in, widening the gulf between the urban haves and the rural have‑nots. Wall Street floated above the common people like a giant balloon, its self‑mythologizing leaders enjoying the comforts of their privileged realm. The government took little notice, as an extreme form of laissez‑faire reigned in Washington. President Calvin Coolidge was proudly committed to slashing taxes and restoring the federal government to its pre–World War I size and capacity. The American people, he believed, could solve their own problems. He was wildly popular.

Business was only too happy to make its own rules. As giant corporations such as U.S. Steel and General Motors achieved market dominance and racked up profits, the wealthy became a class unto themselves, particularly in New York City, home of Wall Street, the greatest wealth‑creating engine the world had ever seen. While jazz flourished in Harlem and Dorothy Parker presided over the literary scene at the Algonquin Hotel, the stock market gilded the city and the privileged built temples to their own good fortune. Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, and Central Park West as we know them are largely products of the 1920s. Manhattan went vertical. The city’s population swelled to almost 7 million, driven not simply by immigrants coming through Ellis Island, as it had been in previous decades, but by migrants from the rest of the country leaving the hinterland for the allure of big‑city life—and, for many, the chance to strike it rich.

Until the turn of the 20th century, stock markets were small and parochial, dominated by insiders. The practice of buying and selling stock was disdained by polite society as a grubby endeavor, the handiwork of gamblers and social misfits. Most Americans knew nothing of the daily travails of the stock market. In the small‑ and medium‑size towns where most lived, the money games played in the big cities were but a distant rumor.

That changed in the early 1900s, as industrialization took hold of the country. In need of capital to invest in factories and market their products, companies flocked to the New York Stock Exchange, where daily trading volumes soared and ambitious young men matched wits. (It is impossible to ignore that this was a world shaped almost entirely by men. Women were neither welcomed on the trading floor nor permitted to shape its rules—they were observers in a drama they were not allowed to direct, cast in supporting roles as hostesses, wives, or muses.)