The Great Crash - Hardcover

Galbraith, John Kenneth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039513935X ISBN 13: 9780395139356

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1988

Synopsis

A study of the stock market crash of 1929 that reveals the influential role of Wall Street on the economic growth of America

About this title

Review:

Rampant speculation. Record trading volumes. Assets bought not because of their value but because the buyer believes he can sell them for more in a day or two, or an hour or two. Welcome to the late 1920s in the US. There are obvious and absolute parallels to the great bull market of the late 1990s, writes Galbraith in a new introduction dated 1997. Of course, Galbraith notes, every financial bubble since 1929 has been compared to the Great Crash, which is why this book has never been out of print since it became a bestseller in 1955.

Galbraith writes with great wit and erudition about the perilous actions of investors and the curious inaction of the government. He notes that the problem wasn't a scarcity of securities to buy and sell: "The ingenuity and zeal with which companies were devised in which securities might be sold was as remarkable as anything." Those words become strikingly relevant in light of revenue-negative start-up companies coming into the market each week in the 1990s, along with fragmented pieces of established companies, like real estate and bottling plants. Of course, the 1920s were different from the 1990s. There was no safety net below citizens, no unemployment insurance or Social Security. And today we don't have the creepy investment trusts--in which shares of companies that held some stocks and bonds were sold for several times the assets' market value. But, boy, are the similarities spooky, particularly the prevailing trend at the time toward corporate mergers and industry consolidations--not to mention all the partially informed people who imagined themselves to be financial geniuses because the shares of stock they bought kept going up. --Lou Schuler, Amazon.com

About the Author:

John Kenneth Galbraith, born in 1908, was one of the twentieth century's most influential economists. He produced dozens of books and hundreds of articles on economics, politics, foreign policy and the arts, his most famous including the popular trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). He taught at Harvard University for many years and was also active in politics, serving as an adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

James K. Galbraith, born in 1952, teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin, and is the author, most recently, of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (Free Press).

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 039513935X
• ISBN 13: 9780395139356
• Binding: Hardcover