Category: Great Depression
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Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009) by Liaquat Ahamed
Liaquat Ahamed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World” (2009), is a masterfully written and deeply insightful narrative of the economic and political turbulence that defined the early twentieth century. With the precision of a historian and the storytelling flair of a novelist, Ahamed traces the actions and missteps of…
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Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 (1992) by Barry Eichengreen
The central thesis of this book is that the gold standard, “far from being synonymous with stability, [was] itself … the principal threat to financial stability and economic prosperity between the wars.” Paradoxically, the prevailing conventional wisdom at the time was that the opposite was true: only gold could achieve stability and growth. UC Berkeley…
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Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920-1938 (1969) by John Brooks
“Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938” by John Brooks, first published in 1969, is a true classic of American business history. It’s really two books in one, or so I found. First, Brooks brilliantly captures the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties and early Depression years through a number of colorful, but…
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Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (2017) by Kenneth Whyte
Herbert Hoover is mainly remembered today for his disastrous single term as president at the start of the Great Depression. That is unfortunate, as he is undoubtedly one of the most talented men of his generation and led a life jam-packed with memorable feats and achievements. In “Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times” Kenneth…
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The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (1982) by Robert Caro
The first in a monumental five volume series on the 36th president of the United States, “The Path to Power” takes nearly 800 pages to cover just the first 32 years of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s life. Often times biographers lose their sense of objectivity about their subject and end up writing a glowing hagiography. Such…
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Essays on the Great Depression (2000) by Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke has had a remarkable career. For two decades he was a tenured professor of economics at Princeton where he specialized in the study of the Great Depression. And then from 2006 to 2014 he was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank where he guided the American (and global) economy through the worst financial…
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