On today’s show, we’re reviewing a new book by Andrew Ross Sorkin called 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History, and How It Shattered a Nation.
Sorkin is best known for Too Big to Fail, his account of the 2008 financial crisis. In this book, he goes back nearly eighty years earlier to examine the most famous market collapse in American history.
Most people know the basic outline. The stock market rose dramatically during the Roaring Twenties. Speculation took hold. The market crashed in October of 1929, and the Great Depression followed.
But knowing the outline is not the same as understanding what happened.
Sorkin’s strength is narrative. He takes a complicated financial event and tells it through the people who experienced it. Bankers, traders, politicians, regulators, journalists, and ordinary investors appear not as distant historical figures, but as human beings operating under pressure.
The book’s central lesson is not simply that markets can fall. Everyone already knows that.
The deeper lesson is that intelligent, experienced people can see warning signs and still fail to act.
Why?
Because the incentives of the moment are often stronger than the consequences of the future.
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