The US stock market crash of October 1929 is indisputably history’s most famous financial collapse. It is evoked wherever and whenever financial sentiment becomes nervous. Policy recommendations for the following 80 years have been made on the basis of analyses or presumptions of what went wrong in 1929.

And like today’s financial crisis, which accelerated last week with the near collapse and fire sale of Bear Stearns, 1929 was utterly and completely an American phenomenon.