The Great Crash, 1929

New York: Penguin Books, 1980. Revised Edition, later printing. Mass market paperback. Good. 222, [2] pages. Illustration. Footnotes. Foreword to the 1975 Edition. On the Origins of this Book. A Note on Sources. Index. John Kenneth Galbraith OC (October 15, 1908 - April 29, 2006), also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective. Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and stayed with Harvard University for half a century as a professor of economics. He was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published more than a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his works was a trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He served as United States Ambassador to India under the Kennedy administration. His political activism, literary output and outspokenness brought him wide fame during his lifetime. Galbraith was one of the few to receive both the World War II Medal of Freedom (1946) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) for his public service and contributions to science. This is an economic history of the lead-up to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book argues that the 1929 stock market crash was precipitated by rampant speculation in the stock market, that the common denominator of all speculative episodes is the belief of participants that they can become rich without work and that the tendency towards recurrent speculative orgy serves no useful purpose, but rather is deeply damaging to an economy. It was Galbraith's belief that a good knowledge of what happened in 1929 was the best safeguard against its recurrence. Galbraith wrote the book during a break from working on the manuscript of what would become The Affluent Society. Galbraith was asked by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. if he would write the definitive work on the Great Depression that he would then use as a reference source for his own intended work on Roosevelt. Galbraith chose to concentrate on the days that ushered in the depression. Galbraith received much praise for his work, including his humorous observations of human behavior during the speculative stock market bubble and subsequent crash. The publication of the book, which was one of Galbraith's first bestsellers, coincided with the 25th anniversary of the crash, at a time when it and the Great Depression that followed were still raw memories - and stock price levels were only then recovering to pre-crash levels. Galbraith considered it the useful task of the historian to keep fresh the memory of such crashes, the fading of which he correlates with their reoccurrence. Galbraith was of the opinion that the Great Crash had burned itself so deeply into the national consciousness that America had been spared another bubble up to the present time (1954); however he thought the chances of another speculative orgy which characterized the 1929 crash as rather good as he felt the American people remained susceptible to the conviction that unlimited rewards were to be had and that they individually were meant to share in it. He considered the sense of responsibility in the financial community for the wider community as a whole as not being small but "nearly nil". Even though government powers were available to prevent a recurrence of a bubble their use was not attractive or politically expedient since an election is in the offing even on the day after an election. In 2008 and 2009, Jim Cramer took to waving John Kenneth Galbraith's book, and praising it on his show Mad Money. He has been struck by the similarities between the crash described by Galbraith and the crash occurring in the late 2000s recession.