The Great Crash 1929
Author: John Kenneth Galbraith
List Price: $14.00
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ISBN: 0395859999
Publisher: Mariner Books (30 April, 1997)
Sales Rank: 20,015
Average Customer Rating: 3.7 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
The most lucid explanation of the 1929 Crash
Why do the laissez-faire apologists wax so apoplectic about John Kenneth Galbraith? Because he punctures the myth of permanent economic expansion with such merciless glee. This work offers incredible insight into the social psychology that tempted so many Americans to bet their all on a quick fortune in the stock market during the 1920s -- and the blind panic that drove the market into a headlong freefall when thousands of suckers realized, too late, that they'd been had.You have one guy, posting under different names, who has gone through Galbraith's entries on this site, trying to trash the man's reputation through innuendo and outright lies. Read his works for yourself. I think you'll find that Galbraith outclasses the dead apologists for the Hapsburg empire (Von Mises and Hayek)and their modern-day apostles, whose fury rises higher and higher as more people reject their mindless, far right-wing propaganda.
Rating: 3 out of 5
School Paper
The book The Great Crash: 1929, by John Galbraith, is a cynical look at the stock market crash of 1929. In his book he tries to convince the reader of the stupidity of the American people for not realizing the eventual collapse of the stock market. The book for what it is worth is factual and the only point is to explain the crash and the stupidity of the people involved. He writes with a style that is cynical, yet all knowing. He makes it very obvious why the crash occurred but when it comes to explaining how it could have been avoided he gets rather shady. All in all, this book is just a factual account of the tragedy of the stock market crash of 1929.
Galbraith starts his book off with the people, and their mindsets, involved in the pre-crash years. In the beginning it seems that people would have known about the stock market crash eventually to occur, but if they did they did not care. People in the years from 1925 to 1929 played the stock market without really even paying for it. In those years you could go to a broker and purchase stock on margin, which means that instead of buying your stocks with the money you have, you put down 10% and make monthly payments. Since everyone was doing it the stock rose and was became worth more in days or even hours so you ended up not even paying for it. The average person would think at this point that people knew that this would not last forever, but they didn't care because they were making money at the time. The question is why did the government not do anything to stop this. Well before the crash Coolidge was in office and he did not care what happened. In 1929 Hoover was inaugurated and he and the F.R.B started having meetings every day about the condition of the stock market.
The first of many smaller crashes and recoveries starting occurring on Monday, March 25, 1929, in the following six months it was the most unreliable, jumpy market ever. Oddly enough though, the summer held much optimism for the market. The crash itself began on Thursday, October 24, 1929. Even at telegraphic speed, the volume of stocks exchanged was having an effect on time. Crowds started to gather outside of the NYSE trying to figure out what was going on and police had to be called to maintain control. On Friday, the market recovered. On Monday, October 28, 1929 over 9,250,000 shares trade but there was not much of a recovery and this lead to Black Tuesday.
Black Tuesday was the result of the stock market boom in the past 5 years. There were to be 16,410,030 shares traded on that day, everyone was trying to get out. In order to get out you had to get sell at market value. People were dumping their securities and causing even more downward pressure on the market. There was no recovery, the market had crashed and it would take a lot of time and effort to rebuild it. Finally there was the aftermath. People who were rich suddenly became poor in the span of a day. The suicide rate for the next few years rose. The entire world was affected by this crash and it eventually led into the great depression.
The author of this book presented a point, the point that people should have done something to prevent the crash of the stock market, and it was easy for him to succeed in proving this point, for what is there to prove. This book, which gives a account of the crash of the stock market in 1929 is accurate in all accounts and has no falsities in it as far as can be seen. The information is documented and there are many primary and secondary sources used in the writing of this book. This book is easily understood and is a great tool to explain the stock market crash.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Exploring the 1929 crash in elegant prose
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. Similar Products
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