Review of The Great Crash: 1929 By John Kenneth Galbraith

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them." (Galbraith 29)
No one person or institution was responsible for the crash on Wall Street, says Galbraith. However, the climate and culture of the United States and even the world financial community as a whole created the conspiracy of silence that ultimately spiraled into the Great Depression that gripped financial America and financially the international community of markets. It was not, the author suggests in a nod to long-term economic history, entirely unprecedented. But "the singular feature of the great crash of 1929 was that the worst continued to worsen," because the level of speculation was so unusually great in comparison to previous bubbles and busts and the increasingly interconnected international economic sphere. ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

the 1930's.
The book, The Great Crash did not represent a completely new interpretation of the economic condition of the time when it was written during the 1950's. Keynesian modes of redressing economic declines were then the accepted modus opperendi of liberal governments, given the apparent success of the Roosevelt administrations' deployment of the Galbraith-approved New Deal policies and the government spending necessitated by the United States' subsequent entry into World War II. However, Galbraith's condemnation of Wall Street's culture of spending during the 1920's, which was characterized by selling stock to the unwary and a tacitly agreed upon silence in regards to risk, ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: