1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History

From the author of the landmark international bestseller Too Big to Fail, a riveting fly-on-the-wall account of the 1929 stock market crash The most severe crash in the history of Wall Street took place over several days in late October 1929, starting on Black Thursday, the 24th, and culminating on Black Tuesday, the 29th, resulting in the loss of thirty billion dollars of paper wealth. The events of 1929-and the lessons it taught the world-would reverberate through the rest of the century and into the next. Like Too Big to Fail, 1929 will for the first time take readers into the room with the central characters of the crash-on Wall Street, in Washington, and across the Atlantic in Europe. Today's public may have a vague conception of the Great Crash, but it has no idea about the characters that make up this human drama, what they did to precipitate the crisis, what they did to try to end it-nor, importantly, its remarkable parallels to today's political and economic climate. The critical features of the American economy in the 1920s-the establishment of credit as a consumer product and the extreme skewing of income to the upper reaches of society-could hardly be a timelier subject, as a direct line can be drawn between the culture that thrived in the 1920s and the one we live in today, when income inequality is reapproaching the levels it reached then.