Can you translate this into regular english. That anyone would understand?

Question

The speculative bubble was actually near the bursting point. Prices on the stock exchange................... [have no idea what a stock is nor do i know what a stock exchange is] ............... continued to spiral upward and create a fool’s paradise of paper profits, ................. ["fool's paradise of paper profits" i dont understand this expression] ................ despite Hoover’s early but fruitless efforts to curb speculation .................. [never understood what speculation was and the dictionary doesnt really help neither] ...................... through the Federal Reserve Board. A few prophets of disaster were bold enough to sound warnings but were drowned out by the mad chatter of the ticker-tape machine.................. [ticker tape machine... wtf? and what type of warnings]

Answer 1

A company sells stock. Stock allows regular people to buy a piece of the company. You give them money to help run the business and in return they give you some of the money they earn at the end of the year (these are called dividends). As more people buy stock in a company, the price of that stock increases. Just like anything else you buy (if lots of people want it, the price for it goes up). Usually when stock prices go up it is because the company is expected to do really well or it's already making lots of money.

Your article says:

Stock prices were going up, but there wasn't a real reason for it. The company wasn't doing any better then before. People were just buying a lot of stock so it made the prices go up.

People thought that they were making a ton of money but since there was no real reason for the increase in prices, it wasn't going to last. Some people tried to warn everyone that prices were going to fall back down and that everyone was just wasting there money. No one wanted to hear it (believe it) because the prices were still going up.