The Great Crash, 1929 - Softcover

9780395478059: The Great Crash, 1929
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Widely and admiringly reviewed as a bestseller in 1955, John Galbraith's "skilled chronicle and analysis of the causes of that most memorable year in our economic history, 1929," (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) put the past in perspective. Now with a new introduction, it has become even more timely in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash.

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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. 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

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Previous ISBN 978-0-395-85999-5

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  • PublisherHoughton Mifflin Company
  • Publication date1988
  • ISBN 10 0395478057
  • ISBN 13 9780395478059
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages206
  • Rating

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Galbraith, John Kenneth
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company (1988)
ISBN 10: 0395478057 ISBN 13: 9780395478059
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