Customer Reviews

The Age of Giant Corporations: A Microeconomic History of American Business, 1914-1992, A Third Edition (Contributions in Economics and Economic History)

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"Although most Americans think of the 1930s as a decade of economic stagnation, the period was far from being one of unalloyed decline."
- Robert Sobel, The Age of Giant Corporations

Robert Sobel's book is our chief guide for the second leg of the Great Depression Survival Guide. It reinforces some very important points. But Sobel adds new wrinkles to the discussion. As his book's title lets on, it was the larger companies that did the best.

The survivors often had large-scale operations and were leaders in their industries. Smaller companies had a harder time dealing with the Great Depression, as Sobel shows in his book. But the sales and profits of the largest companies increased during the 1930s.

Sobel finds other examples in other industries, everything from American Can in the tin industry to the New York Yankees in baseball. "Good leadership and finances could expand and dominate in the 1930s," Sloan concludes. Hence, we reaffirm once again the value of a good operator, a point I stress in these pages.

Industries that were hard to get into did best. Another other important point here is that Sobel finds industries with high capital costs that kept competitors out did better than those with low barriers to entry.

Review by a writer for Agora Financial, publisher of economic and financial analysis including Financial Reckoning Day Fallout: Surviving Today's Global Depression, The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble, and I.O.U.S.A.: One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt.