The A.I. Boom and the Spectre of 1929

You’re reading The Financial Page , John Cassidy’s weekly column on economics and politics.

As stocks plummeted on the morning of October 24th, 1929, a large crowd gathered on Wall Street outside of the New York Stock Exchange. Pat Bologna, a local shoeshiner whose life savings were invested in the market, dodged into a packed brokerage nearby. “Everybody is shouting,” he later recalled. “They’re all trying to reach the glass booth where the clerks are. Everybody wants to sell out. The boy at the quotation board is running scared. He can’t keep up with the speed of the way stocks are dropping. The board’s painted green. The guy who runs it is Irish. He’s standing at the back of the booth, on the telephone. I can’t hear what he’s saying. But a guy near me shouts, ‘the sonofabitch has sol