On Tuesday 23rd October 1929 without warning share prices are plummeting on the New York Stock Exchange. Investors are stunted in for the last five years the market has only gone up in the space of an hour a staggering two and a half million shares are sold, the next day the downward spiral continues. Few of the thousands waiting in the crowed appreciated the scale of the disaster that was about to unfold. Now could imagine that over the next five days a financial catastrophe would sweep away the foundations of America’s prosperity, but to understand what brought about the crash we need to go back a decade to a time when American confidence grew so high but it seemed the good times would last forever.