Customer Reviews

Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

History always has lessons to teach us. In addition to comments by Golden Lion from Utah, I believed this book really spoke poignantly about the "adjustment process" of global or local market imbalances and the possible causes.

The causes are elaborated in many different examples from the Dutch Tulip crash to the dot-com crash. Signs of the excess liquidity, overly generous expectations of future demand, and other general characteristics are drawn from these events.

In the economic case where A has caused B, then B has caused C, and so on. If Z is a market crash, one cannot blame Y for losses. The book writes that its the cumulative effects of A-Y that has caused this, and more likely the pin-prick that pops a "bubble" is normally from a totally unexcepted source. To me, this was the greatest take away point -- naturally after every market crash we attempt to learn from our follies. However, the market has also learned and adapted, such that the next market failure is caused by a different set, but the same symptoms are similar to A-Y.

On the negative side, I wished that the latest version did a little better job at editing down the redundancies. For example, the Japanese real estate collapse in the early 1990's was used 5-7 times in different parts of the book -- in many cases, the underlying story was retold, even verbatim. I would disagree with one of the reviewers, that one needs an advanced degree to understand this book, however, an appreciation for economic theory is helpful, particularly monetary policies and capital markets. It does not require up-to-date knowledge of the stock, currencies, or bond markets.

Nevertheless, a good book to keep and re-read every few years. Always worth remembering our past mistakes and trying to create an edge.

I am no economist and just an interested general reader. I expected to read narratives about past financial crises and how they played out. But this book is not organized that way. It doesn't tell any story from start to finish. Instead it references lots of different crises in a kind of shorthand way, without giving the background or the overall narrative.

Many of the references are pretty darn obscure, at least to me. So fine, if he's talking about how a certain phenomenon works and he says, "as in 1932," or "as in the S&L crisis," I'm with him. But when he says, "just as in the 1762 case in Belgium" (made up example)--well, my eyes start to glaze over, because he hasn't told me the story of 1762 Belgium, but referenced it as if it should be as familiar to me as the Great Depression in the US.

I also think there's something wrong with the writing style. He seems not to start out with topic sentences that show us where he's going, or to end with a summing up of the significance of what he's just said. Certain details recur within a few pages of each other. The effect is pretty scatter-shot, as if it was not carefully edited and made to flow.

There is plenty of raw material here for anyone watching our current economic crisis and wondering how it happened, but you have to work for it. What I get from it is that in certain circumstances, if everyone does what seems best to him or her in the market, the end result will be disaster for all. It's not really irrational to buy when prices are increasing by the day, because huge profits can indeed be made. But the more people that make that individually rational choice, the more irrational the whole thing becomes.

Maybe I could compare it to a stampede to an exit door in a fire. Each person's individual best choice is to get out as quickly as possible. But if you allow that psychological reality to play out, you might have people trampled to death at the door who then block everyone else from escaping.

Reading this was like listening to a rather elderly professor of history who is intimately familiar with many obscure incidents, but doesn't provide the context for his young students to follow his train of thought.

Kindleberger was a professor of economics at MIT, and a deep scholar of the history of financial bubbles and subsequent crashes. He proves with many examples that growth in the supply of credit is a fundamental factor in bubble development, stengthening associations of this type categorized by Hyman Minsky. While Kindleberger's writing is sometimes redundant, his amazing grasp of the details of financial history, numerous examples, and deep understanding more than compensate for this minor limitation of style. This book has been through 5 editions and is an indispensable reference; it is also a fascinating read. It should not to be missed by any serious investor, nor any student of financial manias and panics.

There is a wealth of great information and insight in this book, but it is organized in a manner that reduces interest and readability. The authors make points and then provide examples from several financial crises, with the result that almost every single page covers multiple events but you never really get a full picture of those events. It is incredibly relevant to the current (2008) crisis, so it is unfortunate the book isn't organized better.

Where are the "hilarious anecdotes, the elegant epigrams, and the graceful turns of phrase" promised on the back cover? There are valuable insights and ideas, but they are buried in more historical information than needed, and are somewhat disconnected and undeveloped. The material is not particularly well organized, and,like history, the author repeats himself a lot. The writing is awkward and difficult to read in places. However, I did pick up a good many insights and bits and pieces of historical information that are relevant to the current problems in the credit markets. History does repeat itself. Although I think this book is over-rated, if you are a patient reader and a serious student of financial markets, I would recommend it.

Sometimes we forget how bad it can be, and then we howl over minor bad times in the markets. We may be past a mania in residential housing, but we have not really experienced a panic or crash yet. People squeal over how bad the equity market is, but recently we haven't had anything like the 2000-2002 experience, much less the 1973-1974 or 1929-1932 experience.

Two books come to mind when I think about disaster in a non-fear-mongering way: Manias, Panics, and Crashes, by Charles Kindleberger, and Devil Take the Hindmost, by Edward Chancellor. They take two different approaches to the topic, and those approaches complement each othe, giving a fuller picture. Chancellor takes a historical approach, while Kindleberger deals with the structures of financial crises.

From Chancellor, you will see that manias and their subsequent fallout are endemic to Western culture. Someone living a full life over the last 300+ years would see one or two big ones, and numerous small ones. Relatively free societies give people freedom to make mistakes. Given the way that people chase performance, we can all make mistakes as a group, with large booms and busts. Much as the regulators might want to tame it, they can pretty much only affect what kind of crisis we get, and not whether we get one. He is somewhat prescient in suggesting that the leverage inherent in derivatives post-LTCM could be the next crisis. This book is a better one if you like the stories, and don't want to dig into the theories.

But if you like trying to place the manias, panics, and crashes on a common grid, to see their similarities, Kindleberger has written the book for you. In it he draws on a number of common factors:

* Loose monetary policy
* People chase the performance of the speculative asset
* Speculators make fixed commitments buying the speculative asset
* The speculative asset's price gets bid up to the point where it costs money to hold the positions
* A shock hits the system, a default occurs, or monetary policy starts contracting
* The system unwinds, and the price of the speculative asset falls leading to
* Insolvencies with those that borrowed to finance the assets
* A lender of last resort appears to end the cycle

I liked them both, but I am an economic history buff, and a bit of a wonk. The benefit of both books is that they will make you more aware of how financial crises come to be, and what the qualitative signs tend to manifest during the boom and bust phases of the overall speculation cycle.

Kindleberger does a great job of demonstrating what the root cause of economic downturns is.The process starts as bubbles of speculation on a sea of enterprise and entrepreneurship as pointed out by Keynes.However,as time passes the bankers decide to shift loans to speculators as well as starting to engage in speculation themselves.The situation changes as one observes a sea of speculation with few bubbles of enterprise floating on top.This sets the stage for the bubble to start growing with the finance coming from the bankers who fuel the expansion in the bubble.This leads to the mania stage.All it takes here is for some tiny liquidity disruption to set off a panic of selling which leads to the Crash as various participants discover that their paper wealth has evaporated ,leaving them with crushing debt loans as their debt leveraging and margin account financing now becomes an albatross around their necks.The end result is various bankruptcies and defaults and a recession or depression.


Kindleberger shows how this pattern occurs over and over again in history.Unfortunately,Kindleberger fails to provide the reader with a simplified summary from the earlier work of Adam Smith and J M Keynes that explains the crucial steps involved in inflating,but not creating, the bubble-(a)loans from the commercial bankers to loanees whom the bank knows for certain are going to be engaged in speculative behavior and (b)the decision by the banks themselves to enter the market as active speculators.It is true that the bubbles themseves start irrespective of the banking system since individuals are free to engage in speculative finance with their own money and assets.However,the bubbles could not grow and expand over time if the bankers refused to allow the speculators to leverage their debt position by obtaining extensive lines of credit from the bankers to expand their debt positions.


Everyone who reads this book should also read pp.290-340 of The Wealth of Nations[1776;Modern Library(Cannan)edition]and chapters 12 and 22 of The General Theory of Employment,Interest and Money(1936).Keynes proves mathematically that it is uncertainty and speculation(the speculative demand for money) that cause involuntary unemployment in chapter 21 on pp.305-306.The neoclassical(monetarism,rational expectations,real business cycles,etc.) schools must,therefore ,deny that there is anything called uncertainty or ignorance;there is only risk, which is represented by the standard deviation sigma.Similarly ,they must deny that there is any significant speculative demand for money;there is only a transactions demand for money.Kindleberger essentially demonstates that the neoclassical schools have absolutely no historical support.This also means that there would be no statistical support for their claims that the normal probability distribution is applicable to a wide range of industrial and financial markets.Kindleberger, as well as the new coauthors of this latest edition, overlooked the immense support that Kindleberger could have used to buttress his overwhelming historical evidence that has been madee available by Benoit Mandelbrot. Benoit Mandelbrot has presented massive amounts of statistical evidence, for over 50 years ,demonstrating that the neoclassical school's claims about the normal distribution do not have a shred of evidence to support them.It should not be surprising to discover that NO neoclassical economist in the 20th or 21st century has ever done a single goodness of fit test on the various time series data sets in order to supply support for their claims that price changes in all markets are normally distributed over time.



I recommend this book .It will allow a reader to understand the negatives that could very well happen in the 2008-2010 time period.Ben Bernanke's 1.2 trillion dollar banker and Wall Street bailout,from August,2007-May,2008, has merely delayed the inevitable while creating massive new bubbles in oil and commodities and driving the value of the dollar to new lows.Bernanke has merely substituted future stagflation for recession.

I saw this book referenced so much that I thought I would give it a try. In addition, I believe the past is usually a good indication of what's to come, given the same or similar circumstances, or that the past can give clues as to how to handle a current situation similar to one that happened in the past. Since we are in the midst of a financial crisis, I thought it would be interesting to see how past crises were dealt with. I thought I was crazy for not liking this book since it is generally alluded to in a positive, even must-read, sort of way. I didn't think I was so crazy when I saw the other negative reviews. The one conclusion Kindleberger seems to draw is that a lender of last resort (i.e., central bank of some sort) helps soften a financial crisis. However, even he admits that there's not much hard evidence for this. Given the moral hazard and distortions that central banks introduce into a system, I find this conclusion unconvincing. In addition, as other reviewers have pointed out, the author assumes a great deal of knowledge of economic history, especially of the West, though of Asia to some extent as well. The book keeps coming out in new editions, which means some people obviously like it, but I rate it one star for content. The reason I gave it two stars was because the notes contain helpful references to other works that could prove more fruitful. Check it out of the library if you feel compelled to know what all the fuss over this book is all about.

Manias, Panics and Crashes is delightful book--funny, surprising, and entertaining. Charles P. Kindleberger has a great sense of humor, an open and inquiring mind, and is deadly serious about informing his reader about the forces leading to financial catastrophes. Given the recent financial debacle and impending financial doom of the US, this book should be required reading for everyone over the age of 16. Of course, it does not address the recent occurrences, but it provides a road map for understanding why the markets rise and fall as they do. It is a solid introduction. Robert Aliber added some additional material (and some organization) to the original version.

Dry, sometimes overly dense, but amazingly relevant to today's mess. While I normally would put the warning label of "heavy lifting" when recommending to friends, being able to see an analysis that shows how bubbles are created and what happens in the aftermath of their popping is worth the effort. Charles Kindleberger puts economic bubbles throughout history into the model developed by Hyman Minsky.

This seems to boil down into: (1) speculation begins in some commodity (often real estate); (2) this speculation causes an upward spiral of overvaluation as investors compete--often irrationally; (3) investors then may use the profits to speculate in other areas (often the stock market); (4) once the overvaluation of the original commodity is "discovered", the whole house of cards comes crashing down. This happened in the lead up to the Great Depression (Florida real estate; stocks) and happened recently (mortgage mania; mortgage backed securities and insurance on the same).

Kindleberger died before the most recent mess, but he warned at the end of chapter 5 in the wake of the dot com bubble:

"The mild and short recession in 2001 after the massive implosion in US stock prices resulted in the abrupt change in the policy of the Federal Reserve and its rapid and aggressive move to reduce interest rates. The result was a mortgage financing boom; millions of individuals refinanced their mortgages at lower interest rates and used some of the cash obtained in the refinancing to buy autos and other consumer durables and to go on vacations...One result was a boom in the housing market...Skeptics wondered wondered whether the deflationary effects of the implosion of the stock price bubble had largely been offset by a bubble in the housing market."

I wish more people had paid attention to those skeptics....