https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6601224-the-great-depres...
It looks like you can borrow it from archive.org, but I suggest buying a physical copy. It was printed in 1941 - and I don't believe ever had a second edition - so it's on thin, wartime paper, which adds to the experience of reading it. It's like something pulled out of a time-capsule, a tangible relic of the time it covers.
A nice example of the power of media to bring something to life in the reader.
It's remarkable about what assumptions people can make without talking to people from other places.
(haven’t read it yet so I can’t vouch for it)
So it means it made sense to do it. Even if you correctly predict the economic, political currents, sometimes it is up to the actions of individuals that are very hard to predict.
But it is basically nothing if you get laid off at age 56, and you can't find another job due to age discrimination, your COBRA runs out after 18 months, but you are not 65 years old yet for Medicare . Obamacare may be completely neutered by then, so private health insurance may cost $30k/year for a 57 year-old. You still have a mortgage, you can't afford health insurance, so you take a risk and decide to skip it, because you are healthy. Then you get pancreatic cancer, and without health insurance, your chemotherapy completely depletes your 401k in one year. Then you die of cancer at age 59, because you cannot pay for the treatments anymore.
It would not really be a great depression of there was not mass layoffs and immense job insecurity.
So you are now alone in a foreign country, no family nearby, trying to adapt to a new lifestyle at nearly 60 lol.
That's the evil thing about economic crises. People with enough capital usually can sit them out and often even benefit. People with less capital often lose everything and when the recovery comes, they have nothing that could benefit from it.
I am close to retirement and I often think how quickly your reserves can be wiped out in a long enough crisis.
In 2026, the POTUS, his family and friends are looting the treasury with brazen acts of fraud. The government is buying losing futures contracts to manipulate oil and other markets, and “mysterious people” are buying securities before scheduled, secret events to profit from it.
The US assassinated the leaders of a hostile power after they essentially gave in to our demands.
We eliminated the governments experts in a variety of strategic topics including oil, and installed toadies to run the fiscal service that disburses government funds.
People are working on undermining the FDIC and decapitating social security.
So a crash now is really disturbing. Nobody can have the level of confidence in the faith and credit of the United States as we did in 2008. The people who understand the complex issues have been purged by the government, and the rest of the leadership is complicit in criminality and is counting on loyalty to secure pardons for later. So you should be anxious.
In what sense was the GFC worse?
Sigh. This reviewer, Jacob Weisberg, is sadly either unfamiliar with the basics of major economic theories, or simply didn't connect the dots.
> or why, unlike in 2008, its responses failed so spectacularly.
Keynesian economics, which heavily influenced the 2008 response (fiscal stimulus part) to the financial crisis, didn't exist in useful form until 6 years after 1929. John Maynard Keynes’s book 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money', which is the foundational text of the field, came out in 1936.
Additionally, on the monetary expansion side of things, Bernanke’s 2013 history of U.S. central banking [1] is useful: he says the Fed may have suffered less from lack of leadership than from the lack of an adequate intellectual framework for understanding what was happening, and that the dominant framework in place pushed them toward the wrong conclusions about whether aggressive expansion was needed or legitimate. And so monetary expansion attempts didn't occur until 1931/1932. Quantitative Easing, made famous in 2008, is a refinement on monetary expansion, I think.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke201...
He had told me working with the CCC was not a bed of roses and he saw many terrible accidents to some of the workers. But he was glad it existed.
Also, back then, I believe people were on average stronger and more resilient people alive today. Having such a crash will be far worse for society then 1929.
People step up very quickly once they have to face a difficult situation. A while ago I talked to Ukrainian about their war. He said some years ago he couldn’t have imagined living in a war zone but once it gets started you get used very quickly to drones flying over you, buildings in your town bring blown up, losing power for days, hiding in the basement. It very quickly becomes normality.
You have to have people that can step up: at least in the US, I do not see evidence of that. Not in the White House, not at the SEC, not in Treasury and Commerce.
The most recent cataclysmic event (GFC/2008) at least had smart people around: Bernanke happened to be in charge and he was once of the foremost experts in the Great Depression. Paulson also had notable experience before Treasury. Who do we have now?
It wouldn't be as bad. People will lose their retirement savings but they won't starve. Jobs will be lost, but it's just a matter of time before they're lost anyway to AI.
But you may have misunderstood something I failed to bring across. Most people in in my generation, including me will have just as a bad time as yours should that crash occurs.
The only difference is my generation will only endure it for a much shorter time than yours.
FWIW, I hate everything avocado, but I will miss my bagels with cream cheese and hot chocolate with whole dairy whipped cream on top :)
This is why I have always said every year to not have any "new years resolutions" and instead prepare for 2030. [0]
> Beyond the intrinsic difficulty of revivifying the top-hatted dead, Sorkin’s rendition is limited by his desire to frame 1929 as a story about people. His focus on individuals comes at the expense of analysis—particularly of the deeper economic forces that made the crash likely, if not inevitable. Sorkin is more interested in how the crisis felt than why it happened. He has little to say about why the government failed to take any meaningful steps to prevent it—or why, unlike in 2008, its responses failed so spectacularly.
Emphasis added.
The review here seems intent on filling in the gaps it finds the author to have left himself.
This one reads more critically:
"1929: Sorkin Rounds Up the Usual Suspects"
> [...] Sorkin stages morality play rather than history. He also helps set policymakers up for the kind of grand theatrical action they are inclined to take anyhow whenever markets turn down. In other words, another 1933- or 2008-style rescue: flooding the market with liquidity, and stringing up wrongdoers and even the better Wall Streeters, such as the Mitchells whom Sorkin seeks to rehab. The same subpar results are likely to follow.
[...]
> Were 1929 a documentary produced by Michael Moore, its suggestions would not matter. We are accustomed to illogic in television. But 1929 presents itself as the researched book Sorkin wants it to be. It therefore claims the authority that such books can carry.
> Sorkin quotes H. G. Wells, who called human history “a race between education and catastrophe.” Indeed, indeed. But for education to beat catastrophe, that education must be a little more thorough.
https://www.coolidgereview.com/articles/1929-crash-sorkin
[0]: I was returning Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations by Walter Lacquer (1990). I found its research and ensuing narrative worth the effort.
Thank you - this is exactly what I want to learn more about. Placed an order.