1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History – and How It Shattered a Nation
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
View on GoodreadsAndrew Ross Sorkin's narrative reconstruction of the 1929 stock-market crash and its immediate aftermath — the specific days, the specific actors (Mitchell, Wiggin, Whitney, Hoover, the Federal Reserve), and the policy choices that turned a market correction into a depression.
Core ideas
- The 1929 crash itself was survivable; the depression came from the policy response (or lack of it) over the subsequent three years — monetary contraction, bank failures, protectionism, and political paralysis compounded what could have been a recession.
- The bank-failure cascade of 1930-33 is the book's analytical centerpiece — once depositor confidence broke, even solvent banks failed, and the Fed's failure to act as lender of last resort is treated as the central policy error.
- The political consequences — the Hoover-Roosevelt transition, the bank holiday, the New Deal — are presented as the institutional learning that produced the postwar financial architecture, and the unwinding of that architecture (which Sorkin has covered in earlier books) is the book's contemporary subtext.
Published2025
Pages577
ISBN9780241479421
ReadOct 2025
