October 29, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Anniversary
It's common now to hear 9/11 referred to as Black Tuesday, but the phrase originally referenced an entirely different sort of catastrophe: the great stock market crash on October 29, 1929. That Black Tuesday saw fortunes destroyed, and came to be seen as the turning point between the Roaring Twenties, when times were flush and life was gay, and the Great Depression. Let's all wish a big Happy 74th! to the end of the first mass market speculative boom in history -- though not, as we all know all too well, the last. So break out the champagne, light up a nice big bonfire with all those Webvan shares, and meditate on just how much worse things could be. Suggested reading:
Update
Did I do this just to get some Amazon hits? asks a reader. No, believe it or not, I just happened to notice that yesterday was October 29th. And if you're at all interested in the topic, you should read all three books.
Posted by Jane Galt at October 29, 2003 2:01 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksfirst mass market speculative boom in history?
i'm usually on your side, ms galt, but... tulips? railroads? daniel drew? civil war bonds?
etc....
roman galley slaves? (guessing here) egyptian grain (from cleopatra & Ptolemy exports)....
not the first, not the last... but the one that screwed our grandparents & great grandparents!
first mass market speculative boom in history?
i'm usually on your side, ms galt, but... tulips? railroads? daniel drew? civil war bonds?
etc....
roman galley slaves? (guessing here) egyptian grain (from cleopatra & Ptolemy exports)....
not the first, not the last... but the one that screwed our grandparents & great grandparents!
I wouldn't argue that it was the *first speculative boom* . . . only that it was the first one to go mass market. The others were, I believe, rather narrower in scope, though perhaps not in impact.
It's common now to hear 9/11 referred to as Black Tuesday
I musta missed this. never heard the reference once.
I'm sorry but if its about economics and its more than a paragraph long I won't read it, but there can't be another stock market crash like the one in '29. Something about not buying stocks with margarine any more. Maybe because recent studies show butter is actually healthier or something like that.
I tried to "Trackback" this interesting post, but for some reason it didn't work. Anyway, I refer to the "Black Tuesday" question here: http://www.discriminations.us/storage/002273.html
south sea was pretty mass market...
but depends if you classify serfs as part of the market...
and the dutch tulip boom was a very mass phenomenon
You're not really recommending Galbraith's book are you?
I am. He's not a very good economist, but he's a very good writer.
More reading related to the Depression and to financial manias and panics in general(degree of difficulty varies from book to book)
"Devil Take the Hindmost" by Edward Chancellor
"Manias, Panics and Crashes" and "The World in Depression" by Charles Kindleberger
Robert Skidelsky's three-volume biography of Keynes, especially the 2nd volume, "John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937."
"Rainbow's End" by Maury Klein
"Irrational Exuberance" by Robert Shiller
Klein is the easiest, Kindleberger probably the most demanding.
Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression is interesting too.
I knew a guy who probably committed suicide, but I've always had a suspicion that he may have just decided to disappear. He was a brilliant engineer who bought into the 60's crapola about LSD "opening up your mind" or whatever, and proceeded to destroy his career and his life. One day not long after his wife died and his youngest kid graduated from high school, the Coast Guard found his boat out in the middle of Grand Traverse Bay, empty. Then it was discovered that in the last few days before this, he had systematically transferred every asset that he still owned except the boat to his children. So, did he take the boat out 5-10 miles from land and jump out, or did he point it towards the middle and jump out near land?
Comments are Closed.