Definition: A stock market crash is when stock indexes lose more than 10{bf6128eaee7daf804a40e739f155a69f2d5a72ca2bacccc9954495bcd60bdcac} in a day or two. However, even in 1937, the best year for the economy during the 1930s, an index of total stock prices, using 1929 = 100 as its base, had only reached 59. A disaggregation of this index shows that the figure for railroad stock was 34 while public utilities stock, which had played such a vigorous role in the boom of the 1920s, had reached 44. The performance of industrial stock was relatively good but, at 69, was still a long way below the level achieved in 1929.
In an analysis published in 2009, Tom Therramus pointed out that Black Monday fell into a broader pattern in which nearly every stock market crash and recession of the preceding 50 years had occurred shortly after a large and abrupt change in the price of oil In the case of the 1987 Dow crash, it was foreshadowed by a tumble in oil price that ensued in the wake of disputes within OPEC , which had come to a head in the previous year.
They do it year after year, sometimes for decades, but when the market does in fact crash, they are only right in the same sense that broken clock is. Paying attention to these people, or worse yet, investing based upon what they say, is a bad strategy.
The days surrounding the stock market crash of 1929 were especially painful for investors who had borrowed money to purchase stocks that had become worthless or close to it. The situation influenced what became a major turning point for the American economy because many of these borrowers, who had leveraged themselves considerably in an effort to participate in the bull market , were ruined financially.
We estimate the effect of the crash on the population average of expected returns, the population average of the uncertainty about returns (subjective standard deviation), and the cross-sectional heterogeneity in expected returns (an indicator of disagreement).