What Reliving the 1929 Crash Tells Us About Today’s Stock Market
In 1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin re-creates the euphoria and mania that led to the most famous stock market slump in history.
People gather outside the Sub-Treasury Building in New York City (now Federal Hall National Memorial) in November 1929.
Photographer: Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThere are two ways to read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929, a new book on the stock market crash of that year. You can pop the popcorn and watch rich men twisting in the lies they tell themselves and others. Or you can read 1929 to match the stories Wall Street told itself then to those of today, a perversely fun project that Sorkin subtly leaves us to complete for ourselves. Both approaches are worthwhile. Neither will task your brain.
That’s because Sorkin, one of America’s highest-profile financial journalists — with twin seats at CNBC and the New York Times — does not seek to explain why the stock market fever rose and broke. It was FOMO plus debt. It’s almost always FOMO plus debt. Nor does he offer a counternarrative about how the mania could have been avoided. (“No matter how many warnings are issued or how many laws are written,” he writes, “people will find new ways to believe that the good times can last forever.”) He isn’t trying to explain the Great Depression, or whether the crash caused it.