This is the prototype crash. Everything true of today’s crashes was true here and easier to understand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
There’s a story about Joe Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy clan and then a Wall Street tycoon. Everybody knew there was a stock bubble. But nobody knew when it would burst. By 1929 it had gone on for so long nobody paid much attention to the dire warnings anymore. One day he left his office and on the way down to the street overheard a shoeshine boy tell somebody that he’d just bought a share of Hup Motor company. Joe immediately returned to his office and sold everything he owned. Two weeks later the bottom dropped out. When asked he said, “I knew that if shoeshine boys were buying stock that the bubble had burst.”