I'm standing here again — the morning of the stock market crash of 1929.

The ticker tape spit from its glass dome like an angry viper, chattering in a manic, rhythmic stutter that vibrated through the mahogany pedestals of the exchange floor. It was 8:42 AM on Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Outside the towering arched windows of 11 Wall Street, a cold, greasy autumn drizzle was slickening the cobblestones of Broad and Nassau. The air inside smelled of wet wool overcoats, cigar tobacco, graphite dust, and the sour, unmistakable sweat of men who had spent five straight nights sleeping on trading desks.

I was leaning against the heavy marble railing overlooking the central pit of the New York Stock Exchange, my palms flat against the cold stone.

Wait.

A violent, sickening pulse slammed through my temple, so sharp I nearly lost my footing. My vision swam, the golden gas lamps warping into smears of blinding white light, accompanied by the deafening phantom roar of ten thousand panicked voices screaming in unison. I tasted copper and cold rain. In my mind’s eye, the marble floor dissolved into a nightmare I had already lived—the sound of sirens echoing off Trinity Church, the horrific, wet thud of a margin clerk striking the pavement after leaping from the eleventh floor of the Bankers Trust building, and the sight of my younger brother, Toby, sitting on an upturned wooden crate in an alley, staring blankly at a fistful of worthless Blue Ridge Corporation certificates while winter snow began to dust his thin shoulders.

I gasped, my lungs seizing as they dragged in air thick with burning cigar ash.

I looked down at my hands. They were smooth, uncalloused, and steady. My charcoal wool three-piece suit was impeccably tailored; the gold watch chain looped across my waistcoat was real, solid eighteen-karat gold, not yet hocked to a Bowery pawnbroker for twenty cents on the dollar.

I pulled the pocket watch from my vest. The hands ticked with agonizing, indifferent precision.

8:45 AM.

Black Tuesday.

A cold, electrical jolt ran down my spine, freezing every drop of blood in my body.

I'm standing here again.

Last time, I had arrived at the trading floor drunk on the gilded gospel of the Roaring Twenties. I was twenty-seven years old, a junior partner at Montgomery & Sterling, one of the most aggressive margin-clearing houses on the street. I had believed Charles Mitchell when he claimed the plateau of American prosperity was permanent. I had scoffed at the warning tremors of Black Thursday five days earlier, convinced that J.P. Morgan and the bankers' syndicate had successfully stemmed the tide when Richard Whitney swaggered across the floor to place bids at above-market prices. I had doubled down. I had borrowed two hundred thousand dollars on a ten-percent margin, dragged my family’s trust fund into speculative public utility holding companies, and told my father to mortgage the orchard in upstate New York to buy RCA shares.

By 3:00 PM today, sixteen million shares would be dumped into the abyss. By Friday, forty percent of the brokerage houses in Lower Manhattan would be bankrupt. By next year, breadlines would snake around the block, and the world we knew would be ground into powder.

The warning signs had been blaring like foghorns for six months. British interest rates had hiked in September; industrial production figures had dipped in August; European gold was draining east; and the call-money rate had spiked to twenty percent. But no one listened. The music was playing, the champagne was flowing, and the nation was hypnotized by the delusion of effortless, endless paper wealth.

"Julian? You look like you've seen a ghost, old boy."

A heavy, leather-gloved hand clapped down hard on my right shoulder.

I didn't flinch. I slowly turned my head.

Standing beside me was Arthur Sterling, the senior managing partner of our firm. He was fifty-four, round-bellied, with an immaculate handlebar mustache, smelling of bay rum and peppermint drops. In his left hand, he held a sheaf of order slips; between his teeth was an unlit Cuban cigar.

"Arthur," I said. My voice was eerily low, completely devoid of the boyish, manic optimism he was used to hearing.

"Cheer up, Julian!" Arthur laughed, gesturing expansively across the floor below, where clerks were frantically restocking order books and messenger boys in knickerbockers were sprinting between trading posts. "The syndicate stabilized the bid on Friday. General Motors is primed for a rally at the bell. We’re opening the ledger on forty thousand shares of Goldman Sachs Trading Corp for the upstate syndicate. Today is the day we buy the blood in the streets and make a million by lunch."

I looked into his eyes—eyes bright with the blind, arrogant fever of a man who believed the casino had no house edge.

"Arthur," I said, my fingers closing around the cold chain of my pocket watch. "Cancel the bids. All of them. Liquidate our entire margin book the second the opening bell rings, and pull every dollar of our firm's capital into physical treasury bills before noon."

Arthur blinked, his booming laugh choking off in his throat. His smile curdled into an expression of sheer, bewildered annoyance.