| It's Halloween, which means candy, costumes and maybe a few frights. Stacey Vanek Smith, Bloomberg Businessweek contributing writer and co-host of our Everybody's Business podcast, visited one spooky spot in New York: a haunted house in a bank that played a key role in the Great Depression. Plus: Big Tech lifted the stock market, and the latest in Bloomberg News' Epstein emails series. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. This Halloween, New York City has a must-see experience for the economically minded thrill-seeker: the Haunted NYC Bank, an interactive haunted house set in an abandoned bank in Lower Manhattan. From the spooky teller to the undead cop who wanders the halls, the experience is decidedly hair-raising. But the killer clowns lurking in the vault could never hope to match the real-life banking horrors that occurred there. The now vacant National City Bank of New York is, in many ways, a monument to Roaring '20s excess and financial carelessness, which had reached a fever pitch when the bank opened its doors in 1927. Just a couple of years later, that excitement broke, leaving the US economy in ruins. And the really scary part: Today's banking industry seems to be hinting at a sequel. Haunted Bank creative director Maria Moyano wove the building's history into the experience: Visitors become embroiled in a bloody heist, involving stolen jewels, a gold mine and a vault full of evil spirits. About 500 people a day are filing through the bank (at almost $50 a ticket). Moyano says the historic site draws many of them in. "I'm an architect, so I immediately was like, 'We have to use the space,'" she says. "I did a lot of research about the bank's history, and I just wanted to milk it."  The haunted house plays into the bank theme. Photographer: Michael Marcelle for Bloomberg Businessweek When it opened for business, the towering art moderne building was the crown jewel of one of the biggest, richest banks in the country. In 1927 the National City Bank of New York had branches all over the world and assets totaling over a billion dollars. The bank grew so big so fast, its president, Charles Mitchell, got the nickname Billion-Dollar Charlie. But even as the finishing touches were being put on the limestone facade, the bones of the bank were rotting. Mitchell aggressively pushed customers to buy into the booming stock market—and borrow money to do it. When the market started to crater in 1929, many of those customers found themselves underwater on their stocks. It was the beginning of the Great Depression. Former Federal Reserve bank examiner Mark Williams worries the ghosts of that event are stirring again. Williams, now a professor of finance at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, points to ominous signs in the private credit market. The largely unregulated industry took off about a decade ago, fueled by private equity firms and startups that wanted to get around the regulation and scrutiny that come with borrowing from traditional banks. Private credit thrived in the shadows and now represents a $3 trillion market, Williams says. "It got so big, the banks got FOMO—the fear of missing out," he adds, and they started lending money to private credit institutions, which turned around and used that money to make high-risk loans. As the economy has started to soften, some of those risky loans have gone bad, causing private credit institutions to go belly up. Now some of the banks that became directly and indirectly entangled with private credit, including regional banks like Zions and Western Alliance and bigger players like Fifth-Third and JPMorgan Chase, are potentially sitting on a lot of bad loans. " The big unknown is, what is the level of the hit?" Williams says. "This market is not transparent, so we can only guess."  About 500 people a day have visited the Haunted NYC Bank. Photographer: Michael Marcelle for Bloomberg Businessweek At the Haunted Bank, the visitors pouring out of the experience were (understandably) more interested in talking about the jump scares and the live-action game of hangman than the perils lurking in the financial industry. "We love scary stuff!" said Elizabeth Artigas, who came with a group of friends. "I've never screamed so much before!" Chris Kent added. Things were likely scarier after the Black Friday stock market crash. The economy was crumbling, and National City Bank stood at the center of the ruin—having doled out millions of dollars in bad loans. Eventually, Congress called Mitchell before a committee to grill him about the risky practices his bank had championed. One committee member accused him of being largely "responsible for this stock crash." Mitchell resigned, and the bank was eventually acquired by Citibank. Today the building stands vacant (aside from the seasonal haunting). Haunted Bank visitor Ni Yao recently left a job at JPMorgan and admitted there was something cathartic about walking through the carcass of a once-great financial institution. "The whole place is shut down? Happy for it," he said with a laugh. | 
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