Great Depression

The Great Crash 1929
$14.95
The more things change, the more they stay the same

Greenspan used the words "irrational exuberance" in the late 90s to describe investor activities that were driving up the "value" of stocks (many of which had no BUSINESS value). Unfortunately, he and the Fed never took appropriate action to rein it in, and the market ultimately crashed.

In this book, Galbraith reveals numerous examples of "irrational exuberance" by investors that foreshadowed the 1929 crash.

The actual decline of the stock market was a bit frustrating to follow since the book is all text, with no charts/graphs. And Galbraith keeps changing the stocks he quotes price declines on. Perhaps that's irrelevant, since the CAUSE of the crash was fairly well laid out.

Essays on the Great Depression
$29.95
In one of those amazing twists of fate Ben Bernanke made his academic reputation through his research and analysis of the Great Depression; it has been said that nobody alive knows more about the economics of the Great Depression than this man, our current central banker. These essays are not for the easily daunted--they aren't the easiest of reads--but even if you don't completely understand everything he says they are still worthwhile for those interested in learning in depth about the depression (and trying to apply its lessons to today's mess). I definitely recommend this book, along with John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929 and also The Pecora Report: The 1934 Report on the Practices of Stock Exchanges from the "Pecora Commission".

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
$15.99
Shlaes writes well but in the end I just didn't completely buy her arguments. I don't pretend to know everything about the Great Depression but have studied it a fair bit and Shlaes has a habit of leaving out or dismissing with a sentence or two some pretty important, even critical, details of what was going on both in Washington and in the rest of the country. This book is worth a skim to see a unique view of the era, and of depression economics, but not as a primary text on the Great Depression.

I also recommend the original Keynes explanation of what a government should and should not do during a recession, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money as well as Ben Bernanke's writings on the depression: Essays on the Great Depression and Paul Krugman's analysis of the depression economic theory as potentially applied to today's crisis: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.

I also recommend the original Pecora commission report, if you want to get a sense of what was really going on to cause the Great Depression, and the kind of thing Shlaes sort of breezily covers but that deserves a more serious treatment: The Pecora Report: The 1934 Report on the Practices of Stock Exchanges from the "Pecora Commission"

Rethinking the Great Depression (American Ways Series)
$12.95
Smiley's book was in some ways a precursor for the more popular Amity Shlaes book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, but both books suffer from the same problem--they blame Roosevelt for the Great Depression, and pretty much ignore the fact that the Great Depression began in 1929 with the stock market crash and had deepened considerably by the time Roosevelt became president in 1933. For the raw facts about what happened to cause the crash, the 1934 report of the Pecora Commission (The Pecora Report: The 1934 Report on the Practices of Stock Exchanges from the "Pecora Commission") is compelling reading--but you won't find much about those true details in Smiley's book--all those facts can be a nuisance when you are trying to write a counterhistory!