<Tr> <Td> October 29, 1929 </Td> <Td> − 30.57 </Td> <Td> − 11.73 </Td> <Td> 230.07 </Td> </Tr> <P> After a one - day recovery on October 30, where the Dow regained an additional 28.40 points, or 12 percent, to close at 258.47, the market continued to fall, arriving at an interim bottom on November 13, 1929, with the Dow closing at 198.60 . The market then recovered for several months, starting on November 14, with the Dow gaining 18.59 points to close at 217.28, and reaching a secondary closing peak (i.e., bear market rally) of 294.07 on April 17, 1930 . The following year, the Dow embarked on another, much longer, steady slide from April 1931 to July 8, 1932, when it closed at 41.22--its lowest level of the 20th century, concluding an 89 percent loss rate for all of the market's stocks . For most of the 1930s, the Dow began slowly to regain the ground it lost during the 1929 crash and the three years following it, beginning on March 15, 1933, with the largest percentage increase of 15.34 percent, with the Dow Jones closing at 62.10, with an 8.26 point increase . The largest percentage increases of the Dow Jones occurred during the early and mid-1930s . In late 1937, there was a sharp dip in the stock market, but prices held well above the 1932 lows . The market would not return to the peak closing of September 3, 1929, until November 23, 1954 . </P> <P> The crash followed a speculative boom that had taken hold in the late 1920s . During the latter half of the 1920s, steel production, building construction, retail turnover, automobiles registered, even railway receipts advanced from record to record . The combined net profits of 536 manufacturing and trading companies showed an increase, in the first six months of 1929, of 36.6% over 1928, itself a record half - year . Iron and steel led the way with doubled gains . Such figures set up a crescendo of stock - exchange speculation which had led hundreds of thousands of Americans to invest heavily in the stock market . A significant number of them were borrowing money to buy more stocks . By August 1929, brokers were routinely lending small investors more than two - thirds of the face value of the stocks they were buying . Over $8.5 billion was out on loan, more than the entire amount of currency circulating in the U.S. at the time . </P> <P> The rising share prices encouraged more people to invest; people hoped the share prices would rise further . Speculation thus fueled further rises and created an economic bubble . Because of margin buying, investors stood to lose large sums of money if the market turned down--or even failed to advance quickly enough . The average P / E (price to earnings) ratio of S&P Composite stocks was 32.6 in September 1929, clearly above historical norms . As per the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, this exuberance also resulted in a large number of people placing their savings and money in leverage investment products like Goldman Sachs' "Blue ridge trust" and "Shenandoah trust". These too crashed in 1929 resulting in losses to banks of $475 billion (in 2010 dollars, which is equivalent to $533.06 billion in 2017). </P>

Who was president when the stock market crashed in 1929