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John Kenneth Galbraith

The Great Crash 1929 Paperback – September 10, 2009

by John Kenneth Galbraith (Author)

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John Kenneth Galbraith's classic examination of the 1929 financial collapse.

Arguing that the 1929 stock market crash was precipitated by rampant speculation in the stock market, Galbraith notes that the common denominator of all speculative episodes is the belief of participants that they can become rich without work. It was Galbraith's belief that a good knowledge of what happened in 1929 was the best safeguard against its recurrence.

Atlantic Monthly wrote, "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."

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper Business
Publication date

September 10, 2009
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.55 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0547248164
ISBN-13

978-0547248165
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was a critically acclaimed author and one of America's foremost economists. His most famous works include The Affluent Society, The Good Society, and The Great Crash. Galbraith was the recipient of the Order of Canada and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, and he was twice awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Business; First edition (September 10, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0547248164
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0547248165
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.55 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #210,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #89 in Microeconomics (Books)
- #459 in Economic History (Books)
- #1,606 in Investing (Books)

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John Kenneth Galbraith
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John Kenneth Galbraith who was born in 1908, is the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University and a past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the distinguished author of thirty-one books spanning three decades, including The Affluent Society, The Good Society, and The Great Crash. He has been awarded honorary degrees from Harvard, Oxford, the University of Paris, and Moscow University, and in 1997 he was inducted into the Order of Canada and received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2000, at a White House ceremony, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

863 global ratings

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J J Sewell

Roaring 20’s in a nutshell!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 5, 2023

Verified Purchase

This book posses key components to today’s economy. I learned a great deal about the roaring 20’s that is similar to some of the events that are taking place nowadays. I highly recommend reading this book for both education and entertainment.

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Sagar Jethani

Astute history which reads like a thriller

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 3, 2011

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Galbraith's account of the 1929 crash is gripping, and reads more like the work of a slightly-removed journalist than an economic historian. Discussions about discount rates and public pronouncements are interwoven with samples of other news of the day-- Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic, the skylarking of stock clerks in Central Park, etc. The effect is to place the reader inside the world of 1929 just as the rug was being pulled out from under him.

No one who has been paying attention to the events of the past three years can fail to see disturbing similarities between the market crash of 2008 and 1929. Why, therefore, was the same dynamic allowed to play out? Galbraith explains from 1954 with an eerie prescience:

"The market will not go on a speculative rampage without some rationalization. But during any future boom some newly rediscovered virtuosity of the free enterprise system will be cited. It will be pointed out that people are justified in paying the present prices-- indeed, almost any price-- to have an equity position in the system. Among the first to accept these rationalizations will be some of those responsible for invoking the controls. They will say firmly that controls are not needed. The newspapers, some of them, will agree and speak harshly of those who think action might be in order. They will be called men of little faith."

The sheer succession of parallels between 1929 and 2008 are mind-numbing:

* a dangerous amount of financial leverage propping up asset prices

* A pyramid effect in which each actor along the economic chain benefited by cooperating in the fraudulent scheme

* Endless 'preventive incantations' from public officials and bankers that the worse was over, when the worse was still to come

* The unearthing of shocking frauds like Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford-- the modern descendants of Richard Whitney and Charles E. Mitchell

* A barely-concealed hostility for Washington by Wall Street, the latter taking the former to task for its apparent idiocy in not being able to follow the subtle machinations of the high finance

* The destructive knee-jerk tendency of politicians to rush to exactly the wrong solution: espousing the immediate need for a balanced budget, despite the fact that taking this to its logical conclusion would prevent government from doing the very things necessary to get the economy moving again (ie. cutting taxes and increasing spending)

* The merciless chain-reaction of margin calls and stop-loss orders which, together, greatly accelerated the downward plunging of stock prices

* The role of academics in providing a veneer of legitimacy to various ill-conceived schemes (one immediately calls Long-Term Capital Management to mind)

* The seduction of traditional watchdogs, mentioned in Galbraith's words above. While today we look to credit ratings agencies like Moody's, Fitch's, and Standard and Poor, in 1929, the public looked to the banks, which abandoned their role as financial gatekeepers and worked around the clock to convince ordinary Americans why they should place all of their money in the stock market

* The haughty dismissal by the financial press-- especially The Wall Street Journal-- of anyone who would challenge its rosy financial outlook ("Why is it that any ignoramus can talk about Wall Street?", it opined in response to market naysayers in pre-crash 1929)

One is justified in asking how Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve Bank and George W. Bush's White House could proceed along so destructive a path with so rich history before them.

Galbraith offers at least this hope for the future, however: the unlikelihood of another asset bubble in the immediate future:

"...a speculative outbreak has a greater or less immunizing effect. The ensuing collapse automatically destroys the very mood speculation requires. It follows that an outbreak of speculation provides a reasonable assurance that another outbreak will not immediately occur. With time and the dimming of memory, the immunity wears off. A recurrence becomes possible."

One must wonder, however, whether this pronouncement remains valid in an age of compressed historical timelines in which the lessons of one generation are only partially-learned before being inadequately passed down to the next.

"The Great Crash 1929" is an immensely engaging book which will cause the reader to shake his head in disbelief as passage after passage finds resonance with the events of recent years.

6 people found this helpful

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H. Schneider

Horror comedy

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 30, 2009

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Don't read this book!
If you haven't lost anything in the recent crash, you are smart enough and don't need to read this. Or too poor to bother.
If you have lost, as I have, the book is too depressing. Written in 1955 and describing what happened in 1929, one should have thought that we might be endowed with a better collective memory. That we might have learned.
The book has never been out of print, which is another oddity. Every few years we get reminded and then we forget again.
When the book first came out, the McCarthy crowd called Galbraith a crypto communist. Well, the usual crap from the decent people, who don't hesitate to call Obama a communist.
Galbraith, like Krugman, never made a secret about his political allegiance with the 'liberal' side of the divide. (I detest that usage of a good old much abused word.)
He was a brillantly funny writer who mastered the art of irony with bravour. Apart from telling us how the actual crash happened, he gives us a few much needed lectures on important trivia, such as the economics of embezzlement, or the theory of the non-business meeting (I am sure admirers of President Hoover will find these gems of sarcasm overstated and unfair).
His crash story would be very entertaining if it were not so sad.
Obviously nothing much has changed between 1929 and 2008, as far as the inventiveness of the financial world and the stupidity of their victims are concerned.
Essentially the problem of speculation and the boom/crash cycle can be explained with a few basic insights. The criminal energy and creativity of the financial engineers like Ponzi and the present day hero whose name is too dirty to print, is the basis, of course. The world, ie the 'market', is populated by people who want an excuse to believe, and all people are most credulous when they are most happy, ie in a boom. Everybody knows about booms and busts, but no one, wise or unwise, knows when the turning point comes. In shaky times (will we crash or not?) the belief in the value of incantations is unbroken: the essentials are sound, the market is only correcting errors, we have reached the bottom, the future will be stable...
Brecht wrote the lovely question: what is a bank robbery in comparison to the founding of a bank (meaning in terms of comparative criminality)?
I think his question should be updated by referring it to investment banks; maybe the top managers' bonus scheme is the icing on the cake.

P.S. it should be understood that the focus is the crash of 29, not the following decade of depression. JKG raises the logical question why the depression, which might have been expected, lasted so long. He treats this question briefly in the last chapter, and it is certainly worth a much longer, but different book.
He gives a set of structural aspects which may have contributed to the depth and duration of the depression. These are: a) the very unequal income distribution at the time, b) the bad corporate structure of the time, where holding companies and investment trusts were milking the production companies and prevented capital investments in order to pay debts, c)the inefficient banking structure of the time, d)the unbalanced foreign trade situation, e)the low level of understanding of economists of the time (Fighting depression by tax increases and budget savings?).
For sure not the last word on the subject.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer

Informative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 9, 2019

Verified Purchase

Informative read with a sharp turn of phrase. At times, too detailed for me as a general reader, though it was easy to skip paragraphs with long lists of changes in share prices. Galbraith was convinced that there was no automatic link between the crash of 1929 and the depression of the 1930s. I re-read this section twice, but still failed to grasp why he believed this. That may say more about me than him. However, the decade of austerity which the UK has endured after the last economic collapse, will have left the general public even more convinced of the link. This edition has a prologue written by JK’s son, James K, written at the start of the recent recession. It is much better read as an epilogue and is the worst possible place for a general reader to begin to tackle this book.

3 people found this helpful

DOPPLEGANGER

GOOD ECONOMIC HISTORY

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 15, 2014

Verified Purchase

Those expecting both a factual account of this great financial happening together with an indication on the likelihood of a recurrence of the misfortunes of 1929 will be a little disappointed. The author states specifically that this is an economic history work dealing with not much more than what actually happened and is not intended to predict whether or when a similar fiscal collapse will happen in the future.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that, with slightly different circumstances but with very similar underlying weaknesses in the system of regulation, that such major upheavals in the financial system will occur from time to time, witness the 2008 Credit Crunch. The precursor and 'flashing red lights' is a period of rapidly increasing prices whether it be Stocks, Shares, Commodities or Property accompanied by lack of fiscal regulation, people believing that nothing can stop the rising values, and that ever present 'switcher-off' of commonsense, Greed.

Mr Galbraith narrates an interesting and I assume accurate history of the meltdown on Wall Street and beyond in around 1928, which is very easy to read and become engrossed in the careering of the money truck down the steep decline, knowing that it will splatter in all directions eventually.

The Author is very gentle and it might be said a little over generous in absolving any major responsibility for the debacle from just about all Bankers, Stockbrokers, Politicians, Economists, Investment Advisers, Regulators, and, of course the poor all punters themselves. Beyond these parties it is difficult to drum up others that might have shared responsibility. I found his generosity in this regard a little disconcerting in that it does not offer a constructive guide to avoiding a repeat, as has been the case.

Perhaps the wisdom of Nassim Nicholas Taleb might explain the lemming like tendency that occurred in 1928 when he mused "It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one."

A very competent and engrossing work of Economic History but with little attempt to advising how to spot and stop a reoccurrence such as the 1980's S & L financial disaster and the 2008 Credit Crunch Tsunami which cost taxpayers $Trillions.

4 people found this helpful

Tim

Not an economic analysis

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 22, 2019

Verified Purchase

Was looking for an economic analysis but this book is nothing of the sort. It essential goes on and on about how investors rushed to invest, and gives a good idea of the rush to buy and sell at the time, but it talks very little of the actual economic causes and consequences caused by the crash. It is more a narrative than anything else. The pages are small and the words are big tho so you can get it out of the way quite quickly if you do buy it. Disappointingg considering Galbraith is himself an economist.

2 people found this helpful

WalkerStef

Whatever your level of understanding, you'll come away wiser.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 16, 2021

Verified Purchase

Superb account of the 1929 Crash. Very readable and sometimes hard to put down. Well balanced description of some very complex issues. The fact that some of these issues were beyond my understanding didn't detract from my enjoyment. Highly recommended.

goldenears

The best antidote to to political and economic hubris that i have ever read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 24, 2015

Verified Purchase

In my opinion this is one of the best books written about economics. It explains why the Great Crash of '29 happened. It also predicted that the same thing will happen again in 2008/9 and why it will no doubt happen again. It also shows how economists, politicians and the general public fail
to learn from past mistakes and keep on repeating the same errors. it is the best antidote to political and economic hubris that I have ever read. It should be compulsory reading for every school student.

2 people found this helpful

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