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Title: The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith ISBN: 0-395-85999-9 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 30 April, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.7 (27 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Exploring the 1929 crash in elegant prose
Comment: Economics, like physics, has a fundamental canon: you cannot make money out of nothing. To narrate the history of financial bubbles is to chronicle those times when people overlooked that fact. In those instances, asset prices soar merely to be resold for profit, with little regard as to their actual value; when something shakes confidence and buyers are in short supply, a crash follows as prices were sustainable only insofar as they could be resold higher.
According to John Galbraith, the stock-market crash that took place in the fall of 1929 was typical of this prototype. Mr. Galbraith, a Harvard economist, traced the optimism to the Florida real-estate bubble of 1925 which made people forget the elementary rules of money making. What follows is an elegant narrative that interweaves economics with history to produce one of the most telling and lucid accounts of the developments, economic and otherwise, that lead up to the October 1929 crash.
The crash, according to Mr. Galbraith, was caused by an admixture of bad income distribution (economy too dependent on luxury spending and investment), bad corporate structure, bad banking structure, foreign imbalances, and bad economic intelligence. In seeking compelling explanations, the "Great Crash" often resists conventional wisdom: for example, to those who blame the abundance of credit, Mr. Galbraith answers: "on numerous occasions before and since credit has been easy, and there has been no speculation whatever." Mr. Galbraith looks beyond central banking and interest rates to compile a rich and diverse history of the 1929 crash.
So what about preventing future crises? Here, Mr. Galbraith is ambivalent. Regulation has and can play a substantial role in preventing future troubles. But the problem lies elsewhere: people continue to believe that they have been blessed, and that they can make money with little or no effort. When wise men see such folly and decide to partake in it rather than spoil it, a bubble that later crashes is inevitable. For all those who seek an economic solution to this economic problem, Mr. Galbraith surely disappoints. The surest protection against over-speculation, he writes, is to remind people that you can never get something from nothing. Those in love with central banking might find the idea simplistic, yet its beauty lies with its simplicity.
Rating: 5
Summary: A must read for a research paper
Comment: I'm a junior in high school doing a research paper on the stock market crash of 1929. Without reading this book I would be left in the dark. Reading 6 other books, Galbraith is the only author who writes in a language that is easily understandable to someone who does not know how to calculate a beta ranking for a stock.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating. Effective. Inventive.
Comment: Galbraith's inventive work on the fascinating events leading up and preceding the 1929 stock market crash is must-read for anyone interested in the national economy, how it functions, how it fails, and what role the federal government plays in perpetuating or stifling the situation.
He very convincingly establishes a good groundwork for the reader, explaining why the stock market was in such a large expansion and how federal regulation (or lack therof) enabled the financial firms to operate in very risky and perhaps unethical ways.
Obviously, the book chronicles the disastrous declines in 1929 and further discusses the federal government's attempts to revive the American economy, those for the most part failed.
The most important lesson this book can allay to the reader is that economies are not self-sustaining structures that are only subject to supply and demand shifts. In instances like the 1929 crash, the prognosis for dynamic economies can often lie in the actions of a handful of actors/people. A good lesson to remember.
Indeed there are many lessons to be learned from this book, many that are relevant to today's economy (2003). Read this book with care and with a comparative mindset!
A must read for economists and public policy makers!
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Title: A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith ISBN: 0140238565 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics) by Charles P. Kindleberger ISBN: 0471389455 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 12 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay ISBN: 051788433X Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor ISBN: 0452281806 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 05 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The World in Depression, 1929-1939 by Charles P. Kindleberger ISBN: 0520055926 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1986 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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