How Did The Stock Market Perform During WWII?
Not the way you might think
The stock market is a strange and amorphous thing. If people could understand it better they could be rich. Indeed, even today there are entire businesses set up to try and get people to buy the secret to understanding the stock market. The reality is, we can all guess but predicting what the market is going to do is impossible and frequently maddening.
This phenomena is highlighted very well by studying how the markets performed during the Second World War. Were the markets down? How did a global conflict affect stock prices?
The stock market and World War II are two topics that everybody loves to talk about, yet, when I did some digging, very few people have actually gone into detail about how the markets performed during World War II. Here is what I found out.
American stock market
The Great Depression ruined the stock market and caused a banking crash that is still talked about today. After the initial crash in 1929, the market went through a horrible three year period in the depths of the Great Depression that saw the market bottom…