The Great Crash 1929: The classic account of financial disaster |  | Author: John Kenneth Galbraith
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
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Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 8270
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 014103825X
EAN: 9780141038254
ASIN: 014103825X
Publication Date: October 29, 2009
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Product Description
Examines the 'gold rush fantasy' in American psychology and describes its dire consequences. This book talks about the Florida land boom, the operations of Insull, Kreuger and Hatry, and the Shenandoah Corporation.
Amazon.co.uk 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 in the US. 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, Amazon.com
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 26
 The book every student of the Crash of '29 should read May 12, 2010
Dewdrop (England)
As someone who only knew the myths of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, this book was a real revelation to me. Even after all these years, the work can still be judged to be THE academic account of the events of that period. Galbraith's work is succinct but manages to cover every aspect of the events prior to,during and after the Crash, and the effects of the Crash on the US and the rest of the world. His analysis certainly resonates with the economic conditions which preceded the current world recession. Galbraith presents a fair, balanced and well-informed view of the period and is particularly good at analysing the fundamental defects in the US economy and the banking system which made the effects of the Crash so catastrophic. He discusses the link between the Crash and the onset of the Great Depression, but avoids drawing easy conclusions. Naturally there is a great deal of economic statistics and detail but the book remains readable to the end, even to a non-economist. For anyone studying this period in US history, this is the place to start.
 Great Book - Poor Edition May 10, 2010
Doultsinea Donkichotaki
The book is a marvellous illustration of the Great Crash of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929. It explores the background of the Crash and the conditions which facilitated its occurence. Galbraith presents facts and numbers in a clear and meaningful way and allows readers to draw reasonable conclusions about the Crash, the political and economic agents that played a significant role in avoiding to restrain the up-coming bubble and the behaviour of ordinary people durinh the entire period.
However, despite the illustrative writing, this edition of the book by Penguin is totally disappointing. Fonts are not clearly printed, and, on the whole, reading the book is physically tiring. Had it not been for Galbraith's attractive writing style, I would have quit this book from the very first moment.
 Great description of the crash February 23, 2010
Michael Klein (UK)
Kenneth Galbraith is a really could narrator of economic history and his account of the Great Crash on Wall Street in 1929 is both, enjoyable and easy to read. Readers who want to know, what the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was about, what causes and consequences it had, will get a fair amount of information in this book that mingles the madness that drove the rush to expected wealth on Wall Street with the particular interests held by those who ruled Wall Street (or at least who thought so). That the bubble created over 1928 and half of 1929 bursted was unavoidable that it took not only some weeks, but some years for the market to recover, however, is a mystery that even Galbraith cannot solve. Nevertheless, the reader gets a thorough account of what happens when prices for shares run ahead of "real value" and of the problems contemporaries had in determining what the "real value" of a company and hence the correct price for its shares was likely to be. Hindsight has it, that almost all shares traded at Wall Street had been overpriced, but contemporaries and most so, contemporary economists, pleased themselves with assurances about the validity of prices. Thus, the Great Crash seems to have had social causes and this may be a weakness of Galbraith's account. He does not really go into the different motives that drove about 1.2 million participants to join the race for wealth that ruled Wall Street in these days. But maybe to disentangle social networks and describe the interaction between actors that resulted in the cataclysmic financial fatality of 1929 is too much to be asked of an economist. In any case Galbraith's book is a classic, and readers will have feelings of a deja vu quite often. Some of the trading techniques that ballonoed the bubble in 1929 are all to familiar in the days of the subprime mortgage crisis. Today, it is not so much a question of getting the price of a share right, but rather a question of coupling the price of derivatives to the value of the underlying. Pricing problems in markets have weathered the last 80 years and Galbraith's conclusion that bubbles like the one of 1929 can and will happen again (, but may not necessarily be followed or co-occurring with a recession) is - once again - proven to be correct.
The Great Crash by JK Galbraith December 31, 2009
David J. Taylor-gooby (Durham UK)
The copy was in excellent condition, as good as new.
This is a book still relevant today, and considered a classic.
Prophetic December 28, 2009
Colum Kenny (Ireland)
This is a very well written and entertaining book about the recurrent nature of human folly. Written in the 1950s, it forewarns of the possibility of another economic collapse when those who lived through the 1929 experiences are dead. Witty, incisive, informative, it is a model of good academic writing and is accessible to those of us who are not economists. If only the financial "regulators" of many countries had read it and taken it to heart five years ago.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 26
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