Summary of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The 1920s were a good time in America. Production and employment were high and rising, wages were not going up much, but prices were stable. Many people were still very poor, but more people were comfortably well-off or rich than ever before.

#2 The American people of the 1920s were displaying an inordinate desire to get rich quickly with a minimum of physical effort. This was demonstrated by the Florida real estate boom, which was built on the assumption that the whole peninsula would be populated by holiday-makers and sun-worshippers in a new and remarkably indolent era.

#3 The pursuit of effortless riches brought people to Florida in increasing numbers from 1925 to 1926. However, in the spring of 1926, the supply of new buyers began to fail, and the boom was not left to collapse of its own weight.

#4 The classic pattern of the end of a boom is for people to refuse to admit that it is over. This is also in accordance with the classic pattern, as the end had come in Florida in 1925, when bank clearings in Miami were $1,066,528,000.

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Release date

Ebook: 23 April 2022