During the great depression, many Americans lost their life savings due to the great stock market crash and the failure of many of the nation’s banks. This resulted in one of the depression’s most enduring legacies: the reluctance of many people who suffered this fate to invest their future earnings in the stock market, or, in many cases, even put them in the bank. We’ve all heard the stories about descendants of depression era survivors finding huge amounts of cash in the homes (hidden in the walls, buried in the yard, etc.) of relatives after their deaths.











