The Great Crash, 1929 The Great Crash, 1929 The Great Crash, 1929 is a book written by John Kenneth Galbraith and published in 1955; it is an economic history of the lead-up to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book argues that the 1929 stock market crash was precipitated by rampant speculation in the stock market, that the common denominator of all speculative episodes is the belief of participants that they can become rich without work and that the tendency towards recurrent speculative orgy serves no useful purpose, but rather is deeply damaging to an economy. It was Galbraith's belief that a good
Wall Street office vacancy rates downtown which were "persistently high" and with some buildings "standing empty". The day of the stock market drop, October 20, was marked by "stony-faced traders whose sense of humor had abandoned them and in the exhaustion of stock exchange employees struggling to maintain orderly trading". Ironically, it was the same year that Oliver Stone's movie "Wall Street" appeared. In 1995, city authorities offered the "Lower Manhattan Revitalization Plan" which offered incentives to convert commercial properties to residential use. Construction of the World Trade Center began in 1966 but had trouble attracting tenants when completed. Nonetheless, some substantial