Books·May 29, 2026

1929

The dance between the players who led The Great Depression

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Author	Andrew Ross Sorkin
Year	2025

The book follows bankers, speculators, politicians, Federal Reserve officials, and ordinary investors as easy credit, margin trading, and overconfidence pushed the market into dangerous territory.
Its core argument is that the crash was not just a market accident, but a human and systemic failure whose consequences helped shatter the economy and reshape American finance.

At the end of the day, everything is about psychology before the numbers. The Great Depression was a story of belief that “this time is different” and ignoring warnings, over-leveraging because everyone else is doing it, but no one was doing anything ‘particularly illegal’.
America recovered its endless optimism in 2008, finding another loophole in the financial system. Maybe afterall, history repeats itself like the serpent eating its tail.

The almost singular through line behind every major financial crisis is one thing: debt.
Lengthy, uninterrupted booms, like the one in the 1920s, produce a collective delusion. Optimism becomes a drug, or a religion, or some combination of both. Propelled along by a culture of hot tips, one-of-a-kind deals, killer sales pitches, and irresistible slogans, people lose their ability to calculate risk and distinguish between good ideas and bad ones.
That’s what debt does - it draws the wealth of tomorrow into the present. Problems arise when we get greedy and take too much. Nobody knows for sure where the line is—or what to do when we discover we’ve gone past it. At that point, panic is the natural reaction. The future suddenly grows so small and dark that there isn’t enough optimism left to draw from.
“Lack of confidence is contagious; but, on the other hand, so is confidence contagious. And, in the opinion of many of your earnest friends, some reassuring utterance by the President of the United States…would do much to restore the confidence of the public.”