We all know the day after Thanksgiving is referred to Black Friday... but why?
Black Friday originally started to refer to the raids on Gold in September 1869.
During this time, Ulysses S. Grant was President, and two ruthless Wall Street financiers Jay Gould and his partner Jim Fisk tried to bribe Grant on the price of gold.
In short what these two did was buy up as much of the nations gold as possible to keep driving the price up and up in hopes of getting insane profits.
To do this, Gould, had to convince Grant who couldn't be bribed. Gould tried many times to convince Grant that letting the price of gold drop would hurt American farmers as Russia would be able to leverage the low gold prices against America and it crop resulting in Russia profiting from grain sales over America profiting from grain sales.
Grant never gave Gould an answer and was slow to act or respond to any of Goulds requests and advice.
To better secure Goulds position, Gould had bribed two important people within government to give Gould a heads up if the government would make a move on Gold lowering the price.
On September 24th, a Friday, the conspiracy came to a head and the stock market began to free fall. To cover Goulds tracks, Jim Fisk would purchase just enough gold to make it seem like gold prices are still climbing while Gould sold portions of his gold shares.
With the gold prices seeming to continue climbing and banks beginning to panic, the Government, released 4 million worth of gold into the market to bring the price down.
In the end Gould had made out very well with this scheme.
This came to be known as Black Friday with a such a big financial crisis.
There were multiple other Black Friday financial crisis in the future and eventually the big retail day we know of today.
But this one was the first well known date of a Black Friday.