{"id":315649,"date":"2025-10-19T09:22:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T09:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/315649\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T09:22:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T09:22:09","slug":"disorder-fright-and-confusion-looking-back-at-the-devastating-wall-street-crash-of-1929-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/315649\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Disorder, fright and confusion\u2019: looking back at the devastating Wall Street crash of 1929 | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Ross Sorkin\u2019s first book, Too Big to Fail<\/a>, was a bestseller about the financial crisis of 2008, published the following year. His second, 1929, out this week, takes readers \u201cInside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History \u2013 and How it Shattered a Nation\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been 16 years between books, but Sorkin hasn\u2019t been idle. A columnist for the New York Times, he founded its DealBook newsletter and summit; he\u2019s a Squawk Box co-anchor for CNBC; and after Too Big to Fail was filmed by HBO, he co-created Billions, a huge hit for Showtime starring Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti.<\/p>\n

After Too Big to Fail, Sorkin said, he was \u201coften asked about 1929. I actually didn\u2019t know much. I had read JK Galbraith<\/a> [The Great Crash, 1929, published in 1955] and a couple other books. And most people I knew, we would all sort of talk about 1929 as this terrible calamity, but nobody \u2026 knew what actually happened \u2013 who the people were, what they said to each other, what the motivations were, what the incentives were, what the lessons actually were.\u201d<\/p>\n

The short version of what happened in 1929 is that a stock market built on fast credit and wild speculation suffered a series of falls culminating in the Black Thursday crash on 24 October, in Galbraith\u2019s words a day \u201cmeasured by disorder, fright, and confusion\u201d.<\/p>\n

Combined with factors including protectionist tariffs and rising unemployment, the crash was a key signpost to a devastating global depression.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbout a decade ago,\u201d seeking a way into the story, Sorkin went on vacation and \u201clike a real nerd, downloaded some books to a Kindle \u2026 and I remember reading them, thinking: \u2018Wow, this is so much more interesting than I knew,\u2019 but also feeling most of the books about this period were written in the 1930s, some in the 40s, 50s. I think there\u2019s one that was maybe the 70s. And a lot of them were written by economists \u2026 told through charts and data and economic systems. And I wanted the human drama.<\/p>\n

The cover of 1929. Photograph: Viking\/Penguin<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the lessons of writing Too Big to Fail was, we talk about business and the economy oftentimes in big numbers and structures and systems, but it really is ultimately about people and the decisions they make. So I thought: \u2018Maybe there\u2019s an opening to write a book like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

A visit to Harvard allowed a look at the papers of Thomas Lamont, a partner at JP Morgan, including transcripts of White House talks with President Herbert Hoover. Allowing for myriad commitments and the challenges of pandemic-era research, Sorkin\u2019s book was a go.<\/p>\n

As influences for a book based on first-hand sources found in countless archives, Sorkin cites business classics: Den of Thieves by James B Stewart, about insider trading; Liar\u2019s Poker by Michael Lewis, about bonds traders; and Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, about the fall of RJR Nabisco.<\/p>\n

\u201cWidening the aperture\u201d, a phrase Sorkin uses to describe a project that encompasses earlier panics (1907, 1921) and the long aftermath of 1929, he also looked to Walter Lord\u2019s A Night to Remember, from 1955, as \u201creally the definitive in-the-room account of the sinking of the Titanic\u201d and \u201cactually a little bit like a mental model \u2026 [for] a way I wanted the reader to be able to feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crash of 1929 was indeed like a shipwreck. Livelihoods were lost when the market capsized, though Sorkin confirms that one image in the popular imagination, of ruined brokers leaping from Wall Street windows, is not what actually happened. For a while, it seemed the economy might recover. It took other factors, prominently including the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, to bring about depression.<\/p>\n

As Sorkin\u2019s book comes out, Donald Trump\u2019s tariffs and their effects are in the news. Sorkin said he wrote with an eye on current events but preferred not to oversell such parallels, instead seeking chiefly to present relatable characters.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m always trying to understand where the drive comes from, where the motivation comes from, for whatever the decision is that people are making,\u201d Sorkin said, citing experience gained \u201cin the context of Billions and the making of the movie Too Big to Fail\u201d as well as \u201cwhat I try to do with my journalism every day.<\/p>\n

\u201cOftentimes it was to try to understand: \u2018Well, what is it that\u2019s driving Charlie Mitchell?\u2019 \u2026 or: \u2018What was it about Carter Glass in his childhood that led him to be this sort of very unique character?\u2019 Similarly with Lamont and John Raskob and so many others.\u201d<\/p>\n

The front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper. Photograph: Icon Communications\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Mitchell, CEO of National City Bank, a casualty of the crash, was hauled before Congress and into court on tax charges. Glass was a senator from Virginia who drove reform<\/a> to protect ordinary Americans from Wall Street excess. Raskob, an executive at DuPont and General Motors, chaired the Democratic National Committee.<\/p>\n

One way Sorkin seeks to make such characters relatable is to depict their use of technology to master fast-moving markets \u2013 analog telephones in serried ranks on desks above Wall Street now home to computers. He\u2019s also happy to compare key players to equivalents today.<\/p>\n

Considering Glass, a Virginia conservative, Sorkin looks to a current senator from Massachusetts, decidedly more progressive, the force behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau<\/a>, formed after 2008 to protect ordinary investors.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Elizabeth Warren was a racist, that\u2019s who [Glass] would be,\u201d Sorkin laughed. \u201cBut what, to me, was so interesting about [Glass] was also that \u2026 he was cited after the 2008 financial crisis as one of the great bastions of the regulatory world. I think liberals really loved him. They thought that he was really trying to hold Wall Street to account.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I went into this project thinking about that narrative, and \u2026 as the story progresses, it is so much more complicated than that. I\u2019m not sure Elizabeth Warren would be citing Carter Glass today if she really understood the full dynamic of how the Glass-Steagall Bill<\/a> was created.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought of Glass-Steagall [also named for Henry B Steagall, a congressman from Alabama] as this famous bill that broke up the banks and was really meant to end the casino [gambling on the markets], and then you realize \u2026 the real movers weren\u2019t even politicians, to some degree they were bankers who were trying to screw each other. And maybe it just represents how this world is actually no different than it is today, in many ways, in terms of how the sausage gets made.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among those bankers, Sorkin found Mitchell \u201csort of a villain, but not really\u201d and compelling because \u201cI love characters that are not black and white. And he was so interesting to me because he was as famous as Jamie Dimon [CEO of JPMorgan Chase] would be today. But there were aspects of [Mitchell] that might have been more like a Michael Milken,\u201d the insider trader jailed in 1990 then pardoned<\/a> by Trump in 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cCharlie Mitchell created credit and leverage in the system to loan money to ordinary investors, which in large part is what led to the crash. Michael Milken revolutionized the debt markets and the credit markets in the 80s by loaning high-yield bonds, or what people call junk bonds, to less good credits. And they both were arrested. The outcome was slightly different, but they were both hated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knowing today\u2019s titans well \u2013 it was his question that memorably prompted Elon Musk to tell critics \u201cgo fuck yourself\u201d<\/a> \u2013 Sorkin is well placed to make comparisons. Regarding another key character in 1929, the Tesla, SpaceX and X owner duly enters the chat.<\/p>\n

Andrew Ross Sorkin. Photograph: Mike Cohen<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, John Raskob is like Elon Musk. Think about a businessman who was involved in everything. Cars, obviously, General Motors, and [Raskob] gets involved in politics \u2026 starting to try to damage the reputation of Hoover by doing all of these back-channel projects. And then he\u2019s building the equivalent of a spaceship, the Empire State Building. And he also happens to have 13 children.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the supporting cast, there\u2019s Hoover, the technocratic president who rebranded the post-crash \u201cpanic\u201d as a \u201cdepression\u201d, inadvertently sealing his reputation as a failure, left to watch Franklin D Roosevelt save the day. Sorkin also depicts Winston Churchill, a decade away from his finest hour as British prime minister, in debt to his shirtmaker, playing the Manhattan markets anyway, wandering Fifth Avenue, there to be hit by a car.<\/p>\n

Financial calamity brings political fallout. In the second half of 1929, Sorkin\u2019s story moves to Washington and attempts to hold Wall Street accountable. As in 2008, most main players avoided serious penalties.<\/p>\n

Clearly, Sorkin is going to get more questions about what 1929 might teach us about 2025 and a US economy<\/a> showing signs of trauma, Trump-induced or not.<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cThere are a lot of parallels that I imagine people could draw out. I mean, look at the idea today and the idea back then of democratizing finance.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1929, \u201cdemocratizing finance\u201d meant opening the markets to ordinary Americans through unchecked credit.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday,\u201d Sorkin said, \u201cwhat do they talk about democratizing finance? They just passed a bill that Trump signed that\u2019s going to allow private equity and venture capital and private credit into your 401(k) plan. That\u2019s all about democratizing finance. Crypto is now a thing that\u2019s about democratizing finance. Obviously, the tariffs are almost a super-direct parallel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another Trump obsession, bending the central bank to his will, is also foreshadowed in Sorkin\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s the whole debate the Fed is having in the spring of 1929 about whether to raise or lower interest rates,\u201d Sorkin said. \u201cTo some degree, [there are] even debates about the independence of the Fed \u2026 So I think there\u2019s lots of things that do seem familiar.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andrew Ross Sorkin\u2019s first book, Too Big to Fail, was a bestseller about the financial crisis of 2008,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":315650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-315649","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115400103919923774","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}