John Kenneth Galbraith. The Great Crash: 1929. New Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Originally published 1955.
The Crash of 1929 was the single most dramatic event in the economic history of the United States, perhaps of the world. In a few days, not only did the New York Stock Exchange suffer a crash not to be matched for nearly six decades, but an era of economic expansion and prosperity came to an end, as the American and world economy slid slowly but steadily into the Great Depression. John Kenneth Galbraith, the dean of American liberal economists, originally wrote The Great Crash in 1955, less than halfway between the time of the crash itself and the present day. A classic narrative account of the process that led to the Crash, and of the events of the Crash itself, it was re issued in 1988, almost unchanged in its text save for a new introduction by the author, in which he relates his account of 1929 to the events surrounding the stock crash of October, 1987. The pages that follow outline Galbraith's view of 1929, and compare the circumstances of that time to those at the end of the 1980s.
For two generations after the Crash, the underlying question was "could it happen again." When Galbraith originally wrote in 1955, memory of the original crash was still vivid, and people characterized their lives in terms of it: "in college before 1929;" "married after 1929" (1955 edition: 1). By 1987, the Crash of 1929 was a distant memory ancient history, indeed, to Wall Street yuppies born a generation after it took place. Yet the 1987 crash immediately raised the frightened question: is this 1929 all over ... and would the sequel be the same?
The 1920s were, as Galbraith points out, a period of real prosperity in America, though (as in the 1980s), this prosperity was concentrated heavily at the top (p. 2). Wages increased only slowly, but jobs were plentiful. Automobile sales, then and ...