I don't want to reignite any kind of feud @sneakypete ...but if I'm not mistaken this happened during the depression. The stock market crashed and that took everyone out.
@berdie
Close,but no cigar. "Took ALMOST everyone out financially" is the truth of the matter. J.P.Morgan,Joe Kennedy,the Rockefellers,and a few others didn't lose any money,and in FACT made money from the collapse of Wall Street because they had already pulled THEIR money out of the stock market and put it in their private banks. I may be wrong,but I THINK it was J.P.Morgan that was reported to have said in a newspaper interview outside the stock exchange after it reopened that "Times are so bad today,a man with a million dollars might be considered to be rich.",as he lit his cigar with a 100 dollar bill.
BTW,this wasn't a local thing,either. It was worldwide,yet how many of the wealthy banking or royal families in Europe went broke?
One thing the Depression certainly did was make it possible for anyone with any ready cash to buy up a business with a penny on the dollar value,and then reopen it and not have any,or much,competition.
You will also notice that all the uber wealthy families expanded their financial empires while times were bad. These were also the people that used their political influence (bribes) to create the tax-free trust funds that are to this very day keeping their grandchildren and great-grandchildren flush.
Funny thing, I just rewatched the movie Saturday. It really is a good movie. But highly sanitized. If you read anything about B&C..they weren't so good. My departed FIL that lived that era in Texas got so darn mad over the glamorization he would just have a fit if it was mentioned. He said all that Robin Hood talk was just bunk.
Not much doubt about that. It was the newspapers that created the whole "Robin Hood" thing as a "vehicle" to sell advertising space and newspapers. The were criminals because that IS who they were by both birth and inclination.
Most people that followed them as fans were just happy to see the bankers get "hit",too. The ones that survived bought up the assets of the ones that failed,and then repossessed the homes and businesses of the people who lost them when THEIR banker skipped out with what cash was available.
Pretty much the same thing happened after The War for Southern Independence,when the yankee bankers came south and bought up everything in sight for peanuts because the economy in the south had collapsed,and they were the only ones that had any money.
I am sure this very same thing has happened in one form or another over and over all through history.