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The Great Crash of 1929
by: John Kenneth Galbraith

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Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.54097309043
EAN: 9780395859995
ISBN: 0395859999
Label: Mariner Books
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: April 30, 1997
Publisher: Mariner Books
Studio: Mariner Books
Sales Rank: 298

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Of Galbraith's classic examination of the 1929 financial collapse, the Atlantic Monthly said:"Economic writings are seldom notable for their entertainment value, but this book is. Galbraith's prose has grace and wit, and he distills a good deal of sardonic fun from the whopping errors of the nation's oracles and the wondrous antics of the financial community." Now, with the stock market riding historic highs, the celebrated economist returns with new insights on the legacy of our past and the consequences of blind optimism and power plays within the financial community.

Amazon.com Review:
Rampant speculation. Record trading volumes. Assets bought not because of their value but because the buyer believes he can sell them for more in a day or two, or an hour or two. Welcome to the late 1920s. There are obvious and absolute parallels to the great bull market of the late 1990s, writes Galbraith in a new introduction dated 1997. Of course, Galbraith notes, every financial bubble since 1929 has been compared to the Great Crash, which is why this book has never been out of print since it became a bestseller in 1955.

Galbraith writes with great wit and erudition about the perilous actions of investors, and the curious inaction of the government. He notes that the problem wasn't a scarcity of securities to buy and sell; "the ingenuity and zeal with which companies were devised in which securities might be sold was as remarkable as anything." Those words become strikingly relevant in light of revenue-negative start-up companies coming into the market each week in the 1990s, along with fragmented pieces of established companies, like real estate and bottling plants. Of course, the 1920s were different from the 1990s. There was no safety net below citizens, no unemployment insurance or Social Security. And today we don't have the creepy investment trusts--in which shares of companies that held some stocks and bonds were sold for several times the assets' market value. But, boy, are the similarities spooky, particularly the prevailing trend at the time toward corporate mergers and industry consolidations--not to mention all the partially informed people who imagined themselves to be financial geniuses because the shares of stock they bought kept going up. --Lou Schuler

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Good, easy reading
This is an excellent book. Easy to read, humourous, and while written in the 50's, it could have been written yesterday. 2008 crash very similiar to 1929...it will be interesting to see if 2009 continues downwards as the sharemarkets of 1930-31 did.

Rating:

- sobering
Witty and sobering reminder of the perils of speculative investment -- gambling in a casino where no one and nothing is in charge -- and the professional and amateur floundering that follows the bursting of a bubble

Rating:

- Beautifully written history of Great Crash told with wit.
Gailbraith's book is an insightful and witty history of the Great Crash of 1929. Though written years ago it seems as if it could have been written yestereday and there are many parallels of course with the economic "meltdown" that is going on around us. I can't really fault the book as it is about the Great Crash, but I wish there were more about the long depression that followed and the path to recovery.

Rating:

- Great Book
Very interesting book, and well written.
There are some sad truths reveled, herein.
Scary to understand the similarities between then and now (1999 to 2008).

Rating:

- Can Americans Learn from History?
The Great Crash 1929
By John Kenneth Galbraith
The writing is surprisingly charming and readable; one senses that the author would be a gracious person. His 200-page description of the Wall Street crash is clear and as interesting as a story about financial history can be; much of it is necessarily a simple chronicle of the rise and fall of the various big stocks in that period. He describes the principal actors of the time--recognizable names like Mellon and Astor and JP Morgan--and goes into the human motives, mainly greed, that led to the crash.
Not until the final chapters does he begin to sum up the reasons for the Depression, claiming that the crash by itself would not have been enough to cause it. Had we had sound banking policies, more honest (i.e., less greedy) investors ... Read More

Books : The Great Crash of 1929