This book was recommended to me. I had seen it come up a few times in my book groups, and I was intrigued. I wasn’t sure how informative it was going to be, though. My parents had been raised during the Great Depression, and it showed. I wanted to understand more of what they went through. However, the main focus of 1929 is on the big businesses that have the most notoriety when it comes to the stock market crash, rather than how that event trickled down to hurt the common man.

I found 1929 to be pretty easy to follow, but I have worked in finance for most of my life. I don’t know that everyone will be able to understand how it all works, although I think the author, Andrew Ross Sorkin, does his best to explain what happened in plain language. Sorkin covers the lead-up to the crash, particularly in that year. The market seemed to be promising that easy times were there for anyone who wanted it, and so many jumped in with both feet instead of paying attention to the cyclical nature of the economy. Once the crash happened, he found that the idea that so many were jumping to their deaths on Wall Street was overblown, although a great many were ruined financially.

Sorkin details what got so many Wall Street firms in trouble. It’s not a simple answer, as the world of finance was very complicated, even back then. Those who seemed to have everything wanted to make more the easiest way possible. They didn’t invent; they didn’t innovate. They gambled and thought that nothing was ever going to crash back to earth.

It was interesting to read how it affected the banks, which had made generous loans to people so they could buy stocks. When the market failed, these people were unable to pay back the loans to the banks, and they began to fail. It was like a series of dominoes that took years to fall. It was at this point that it began affecting the common man, as everyone became afraid to keep their money in banks when so many were failing, which caused even more to fail when people wanted to take all of their money out of the banks.

One thing I gained from listening to 1929 is the reinforcement of my conviction that the stock market is a gamble. Sorkin goes into great detail about how so many people in the 1920s saw it as a way to get rich quickly. It was all speculation, though. There were no tangible products, only interest in companies that often didn’t even pay dividends to their stockholders. People (mostly men) gambled on whether the stock prices would go up or go down, and that was how they made money. I think a lot of the same is happening today, and we need to realize that it is a gamble, no matter how many assurances we’re given.

Many of the names are familiar to anyone who has an interest in the stock market. Firms that are still around were around then. Have they learned anything? I doubt it. Sorkin shows how the laissez-faire attitude of President Calvin Coolidge, in particular, led to the stock market going as crazy as it did leading up to the crash. Herbert Hoover is often blamed for the Great Depression, but he was actually a decent human being who just had the misfortune of being in office when it happened. I could easily see what happened in 1929 and the years following it happening again now. Sorkin doesn’t say too much about it, but he does mention the rolling back of regulations that were put in place after the market crash in 1929. People want to believe it can’t happen again, but it will, eventually.

The audiobook is narrated by the author. Sorkin does a great job, I thought. I had no trouble understanding him, and it felt like he was narrating events and not trying to tell a story. There’s a subtle difference between the two, and Sorkin keeps the tone informative throughout his reading.

1929 goes a long way to helping people understand why investing everything in the stock market isn’t a good idea. Of course, those who already have money in the markets want more people to invest. That pushes prices up for them. When they decide to take their money out of the markets, the prices drop, and those who followed them are left with nothing. It happened in 1929 and it can happen again today.