The Great Crash: How the Stock Market Crash of 1929 Plunged the World into Depression

Selwyn Parker has written a stark and revealing account of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and its aftermath. This serves as a warning to all that financial profligacy, self regulation and laissez faire economic policies run enormous risk of over confidence in an ever booming market and that the illusion of economic stability is easily undermined by what is now called “the shadow banking system.” It is further destabilised when bankers become gamblers, and governments, as President Roosevelt said in 1932, expand beyond their natural and normal growth. Simply living beyond one’s means, buying what you cannot reasonably afford and depending on credit or others’ charity is not a means to prosperity for any person let alone any country. Yet that happened as Parker tells us in the 1920s and we all now know it happened in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Yet again if any politician in government or in the opposition in this country or the United States had read this book, or any other book perhaps on the Crash of 1929 they might have realised numerous similarities. In the early years of the Depression the British Tory-Liberal Coalition under MacDonald made policy in “fear of the markets.” They cut taxes and slashed so called “wasteful expenditure,” mainly on welfare. To satisfy the City a “budget of austerity” was introduced-familiar? This had the obvious effect of prolonging and deepening the Depression and causing even greater hardship for those who could least bear it. As Parker describes the British Tory government like their Republican counterparts in America had no answer to the Depression save “do nothing.” That was because they were disciples of laissez faire and the classical school of economics or better known as liquidationists. Snowden, the Tory Chancellor preferred to reduce the deficit than spend on job creation schemes. Fortunately, their successors in title today are not so blind to history. But in the 30s, as today, management in manufacturing was weak, production methods were outdated and when banks collapsed without rescue like Credit-Anstalt in Austria there were very serious economic as well as dire political consequences for the people of central Europe. In those days Britain was out produced by Japan and India: little has changed.
The key lesson that appears from this narrative is that the government in Britain was in hock to the market. The market ruled and the government did its bidding. Some might say it had no choice, but a singularly wise statesman across the Atlantic who had high respect for the rule of the Common Law and understood economics as well as banking law, better than many on Wall Street, used his constitutional authority to prevail over the markets. So the question today, as then, in the context of this narrative is: does a democratically elected government go along with the market’s dicktat cowering and pandering to those who caused the market crash in the first place or does it exercise its democratic mandate to protect the Queen’s subjects? One is reminded of that old Chinese saying that he who rides the back of the Tiger usually ends up inside.

This was a good general history of how the world fell into the Great Depression. There are sections on Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Japan. I appreciated the discussion on how the different governments dealt with the crash and what they did that helped and hurt.

Great history book and some very interesting facts that are important to know if you are thinking of dipping your toe in the market