1929

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—And How It Shattered a Nation was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin and published in October 2025 by Penguin Random House Books. I listened to the audiobook using my CloudLibrary subscription through my membership of the Boston Athenaeum Library. I chose to listen to this book on a whim after looking at the new titles that were available through CloudLibrary.

Sorkin provides an interesting and not overly long history of the stock market crash of 1929. He describes the practices of bankers and stock traders that led to corruption, insider dealing, tax evasion, bank failures, bankrupties, and the collapse of the American economy. The U. S. government failed its citizens by allowing grifters, cheats, frauds, and forgers make the stock market rise and then crash.

The stock market increased ten-fold in nine years, but it lost 90% of its value from its high in September 1929 to July 1932.

One central figure was the racist and segregationist Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, a Southern Democrat, who helped establish the Federal Reserve System and the FDIC. However, Glass was an opponent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. He was not a voice for progress, and he was an obstructionist in the Senate.

Herbert Hoover was the inept president who did little to help the economy after its collapse. It wasn’t until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt that the government began to take action. But Sorkin writes that Roosevelt’s knowledge of economics was weak and much of what he did was rash and ill-considered.

It is my understanding that the Great Depression lasted until the Second World War when deficit spending and the forced acceleration of the American economy to support the war effort bought the country out of the depression and triggered the prosperous years in the 1950s.

Rating: Four stars, very good.