This book’s launch marks the literary countdown to the 100th anniversary of the Great Crash. As some of the conditions recur, we will be able to see if we have learned the lessons — but the author fears not, concluding that “human nature” pushes us “to believe that the good times can last forever”.
However, this work is more of a draft film script than an analysis, and financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin leaves enough time for a book-to-movie transformation to occur before October 29th, 2029. Referring to the Titanic tale as inspiration, he says he aims “to restore the texture and detail of the human lives at the centre of it to an epic historical event”.
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The book’s trademark formula is the cinematic portrayal of a major big character — kicking off with Charles Mitchell, president of National City bank (now Citigroup), who marketed investing to the masses.
We see him and his hubris arriving for work, as they entered the “double-arched entryway and strode into a long hall, his footsteps echoing off the marble floor and into the vaulted ceilings of stone and brick”.
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The man “wearing a brown suit, his customary trilby hat, and spats”, Winston Churchill, is one of the few foreigners, over for a trip which culminates in his opening trading accounts, losing serious money (at least $1.5 million in today’s values) and being guest of honour at a grim banquet where, as the crash takes hold, the toast from Charles Mitchell was to “my fellow former millionaires”.
A few figures with Irish connections also materialise — including 1928 presidential candidate Al Smith (grandson of Westmeath emigrants), General Motors president John Raskob (originating from Roscommon) and the perceptive journalist Claud Cockburn who later settled in Ardmore, Co Waterford.
Like the ticker tape it traces, the day-by-day account of macho men pacing on marble can become monotonous, despite the opulence and greed. But unexplored parallels with crypto-speculation today and a president who cannot communicate financial truths will be inspired in the minds of many readers. J K Galbraith — hailed in these pages by Ross Sorkin — remains unrivalled for his succinct The Great Crash 1929 as the great explainer of the “speculative orgy” of those years and the decade of depression thereafter.
