The panic that began in late October 1929 remains a cautionary tale for investors and regulators alike. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted in the months that followed, ultimately losing roughly 89 percent of its value from the 1929 peak to the 1932 low. Unemployment swelled to nearly 25 percent and an estimated 9,000 banks failed during the early 1930s, wiping out savings and contracting money supply — outcomes that helped turn a market collapse into a decade-long depression.

“I think the market has reached a permanently high plateau,” economist Irving Fisher famously declared on October 17, 1929, three days before Black Tuesday. His words, replayed in a recent 60 Minutes segment, highlight how misplaced certainties and unchecked leverage can amplify shocks. The CBS program stitched together archival material and contemporary analysis to argue that the mechanics that magnified the 1929 crash — excessive margin borrowing, an illiquid banking system and a failure of central-bank backstops — offer clear parallels and contrasts with today’s markets.

Regulatory reforms born of the crisis reshaped finance. The New Deal introduced the Securities Act, the Securities Exchange Act and the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking; deposit insurance and a strengthened Federal Reserve framework followed. Modern markets benefit from automatic circuit breakers, a standing lender-of-last-resort function and post-2008 capital and liquidity rules that make bank runs less likely. The Federal Reserve today holds a much larger balance sheet and has established repo facilities and swap lines that were unimaginable in 1929.

Yet the 60 Minutes piece and interviewed economists stress that new forms of fragility have arisen. Valuation measures such as the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio remain above long-term averages, and margin debt — which surged during the pandemic-era rally and peaked in 2021 at roughly $900 billion — is an obvious lever for rapid deleveraging. The growth of passive investing, concentrated market leadership among a handful of large technology firms, and the rise of ETFs change how shocks propagate. Short-term wholesale funding markets, where liquidity can evaporate quickly, continue to pose systemic risks as they did in other modern stress episodes.

For policymakers, the takeaway is dual: preserve and strengthen the backstops that prevented a depression in 2008 and 2020, and extend macroprudential tools to address nonbank leverage and market-structure risks. Stress tests and higher capital buffers reduced the danger of bank failures after 2008, but regulators have fewer direct tools over leveraged retail trading, leveraged ETFs and certain shadow-bank activities. Fiscal policy also matters; the Depression’s depth was compounded by early austerity and trade retrenchment, a reminder that timely fiscal support can blunt financial shocks.

Investors should heed both history and data, the segment suggested. Structural safeguards make a replay of the 1930s unlikely, but valuation gaps, concentrated exposures and leverage create clear scenarios for sharp corrections. In short, history is not a precise map of the future, but it offers a set of navigational beacons: manage leverage, safeguard liquidity and ensure policy frameworks evolve as markets do.