Book Review: "1929"

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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There isn’t much suspense around the ending, is there? :wink:

But a good book about the 1929 stock market crash could be enlightening since so many of the current bubble activities echo 1929.

Andrew Ross Sorkin was on “60 Minutes” last week.

Here’s the book review of “1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How It Shattered a Nation,” by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

The Great Crash Retold as Thrilling True Crime — and as a Warning

“1929,” by the New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, is a tale of greed, corruption and incompetence to shock the conscience.

By Zachary D. Carter, The New York Times, Oct. 14, 2025

…

Eight years in the making, “1929” is a more ambitious project than “Too Big to Fail,” informed by the papers of various Wall Street titans from the past century, an unpublished memoir and previously undisclosed Federal Reserve Bank of New York deliberations, along with hundreds of books and newspaper articles….

Sorkin informs readers early on that his book is as much a warning for our own time as it is a story about a bad day in October. Surveying the “market manias” in today’s crypto and artificial intelligence sectors, he writes that “each wave seduces us into thinking that we’ve learned from history, and, this time, we can’t be fooled. Then it happens again.” He concludes the book with an appeal to “human nature” and a brief meditation on folly…

Over the course of more than 400 pages, he narrates a fable of greed, corruption and incompetence to shock the conscience…. [end quote]

There is already a waiting list of 7 before me for my library’s copy of the book.

Wendy

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The re were 93 waiting on 5 copies at my library’s consortium. I used one on my LlibroFM credits to buy it. I’m interested in seeing how it differs from John Kenneth Galbraith’s classic.

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While the topic is broader than just the 1929 crash, I recommend “Lords of Finance” by Liaquat Ahamed as an excellent economic history of these years.

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None of us are alone. We know. We know.

The issue for us is safeguarding our assets. The bond market won’t be it. FDIC won’t be it. Gold might be, I do not know.

BTC won’t be it.

Get out. Figure out which financial institutions will exist a few years from now.

Stop looking for returns. There will be deflation anyway.

Safeguard your assets as if SS, Medicare, and Medicaid are gone.

We will be lucky if this is more like 1921 instead of 1929. If the US can get the will to increase the corporate tax rate to 50% it will be 1921.

I do not think we have the honesty to do that. That can change.