The Great Crash - Hardcover

Galbraith, John Kenneth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395284201 ISBN 13: 9780395284209

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1979

Synopsis

John Kenneth Galbraith's now-classic account of the 1929 stock market collapse, The Great Crash remains the definitive book on the most disastrous cycle of boom and bust in modern times.

The Great Crash 1929 examines the causes, effects, aftermath and long-term consequences of America's infamous financial meltdown, showing how rampant speculation and blind optimism sustained a market mania, and led to its terrible downward spiral. Galbraith also describes the people and the corporations at the heart of the financial community, and how they were affected by the disaster.

With its depiction of the 'gold-rush fantasy' ingrained in America's psychology, this penetrating study of human greed and folly contains lessons that are still vital today - and are now more relevant than ever.

'Lively and highly readable'
  Financial Times

'Galbraith is a considerable writer ­- admonitory, ironic, patrician, funny'
  Guardian

'The definitive work on the subject'
  Daily Mail

'A book you will read at a single sitting'
  Prospect

'One of the most engrossing books I have ever read'
  Daily Telegraph

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was a Canadian-American economist. A Keynesian and an institutionalist, Galbraith was a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism and progressivism. Galbraith was the author of 30 books, including The Economics of Innocent Fraud, The Great Crash: 1929, and A History of Economics.

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: 1979
• ISBN 10: 0395284201
• ISBN 13: 9780395284209
• Binding: Hardcover