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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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1929 summary
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation
23 mins
Brief summary
1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin vividly delves into the drama and aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, examining the financial chaos and human stories behind one of history's most profound economic events.
Table of Contents
1929
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The crash of 1929 punctured the illusion of a decade
Capitalism and crisis were synonymous in nineteenth-century America. In 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and again in 1893 bubbles years in the making suddenly burst. Panicked depositors rushed to withdraw savings, triggering liquidity crunches, downturns, and recessions. Economists, the practitioners of the so-called “dismal science,” were pessimists. What goes up must come down, they said, and that law of nature applied to markets no less than physical objects.
Pessimism had gone out of fashion by the 1920s. It was a decade of bullish boosterism. In early 1929, a government commission concluded that America, now some 11 years into its latest boom, had scarcely “touched the fringes” of its “potentialities.” Its members included the future president, Herbert Hoover. In New York, the home of Wall Street, governor Al Smith assured investors that they needn’t carry metaphorical umbrellas: the future, he promised, was one of “eternal sunshine.” The economist Amos Dice meanwhile hailed the nation’s “optimistic psychology,” a rational view, he thought, given the rapidity of its advances.
According to this sunny credo, boom-and-bust cycles were relics of a vanished age. This, the boosters said, was a century of continuous and compounding progress. It was a fatal illusion.
It collided with reality on a day that’s gone down in history as “Black Thursday.” By the end of trading on October 24, 1929, 13 million shares had been dumped as spooked investors rushed to exit collapsing markets, wiping out $4 billion of stock value. Another $14 billion was lost on October 29 – “Black Tuesday.” America’s financial giants, including the Rockefeller family, threw money at the problem, buying up toxic stock in a bid to restore investor confidence. It didn’t work. The slide continued. The Great Depression loomed.
The economist JK Galbraith, the author of a major study of the crash, wrote that men had been swindled by other men often enough in America. In the 1920s, however, they succeeded in swindling themselves on a vast scale. That collective delusion is as important to our story as the nuts and bolts of stock-market speculation. What made otherwise rational actors lose all ability to calculate risk and distinguish between good terrible ideas? As we’ll see, answering that question helps us see what lessons 1929 might hold for our own age.
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What is 1929 about?
1929 (2025) explores the events leading up to the most devastating stock market crash in modern history. Tracing the unchecked speculation, economic euphoria, and regulatory complacency that created the conditions for the collapse, it reveals how illusions of endless growth blinded an entire generation.
Who should read 1929?
- Anyone curious about market bubbles and crashes
- History lovers interested in economic turning points
- Readers of accessible financial journalism
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