1929

Review

SECTION ONE On October 16, 1929, Irving Fisher announced in the New York Times that stocks had reached a 'permanently high plateau.' Eight days later, the ticker tape on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange fell so far behind the avalanche of sell orders that traders could not know what their shares were worth. Andrew Ross Sorkin's *1929* reconstructs the months and years before that collapse with the same granular, sourced narrative style he brought to the 2008 crisis in *Too Big to Fail*. Where most accounts of the Great Crash focus on the market mechanics, Sorkin centers the fight between Washington and Wall Street — the regulatory battles, the political calculations, and the specific decisions by identifiable people that turned a speculative bubble into a catastrophic depression. The book is aimed at readers who follow financial journalism and want the drama of a specific historical moment rendered in human terms, not macroeconomic abstraction. It reads as an argument: the crash was not inevitable, it was made. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book's implicit premise is that persons in public life bear genuine responsibility for the effects of their choices on millions of others — a recognition that human beings are not merely market participants but agents whose decisions carry moral weight. That premise assumes the dignity and rational freedom of the person, which the Catholic tradition grounds in the imago Dei. - **Fallen**: Sorkin's account of margin trading captures something precise about disordered desire operating at institutional scale. By 1929, roughly 600,000 investors were trading on funds they did not possess[^1], a structure that rewarded appetite over stewardship. This is concupiscence encoded into financial architecture: the person's disordered tendency toward excess finds a system that not only permits it but incentivizes it. - **Fallen (institutional)**: The Washington-Wall Street conflict Sorkin narrates is, at its core, a failure of political prudence on both sides. Regulators lacked the circumspection to read warning signs; financiers lacked the foresight to distinguish speculative gain from genuine wealth creation. Neither party acted for the common good. - **Redeemed**: The book does not offer a theological resolution, but it does imply one structurally: the crash became a depression because the wrong lessons were drawn and the wrong remedies applied. The implication is that right judgment — practical wisdom exercised in time — could have interrupted the cascade. That is a secular gesture toward what Aquinas calls prudence as the virtue that orders all action toward a genuine end. - **Prudence (memory)**: The book's deepest service to the reader is as an exercise in memory as a virtue. Aquinas lists memory among the integral parts of prudence because sound present judgment requires accurate recall of past experience. Sorkin gives the reader a detailed, sourced account of 1929 precisely so that its patterns are available for recognition the next time conditions rhyme. SECTION THREE Sorkin's argument about the structural causes of the 1929 collapse sits in direct tension with Murray Rothbard's[^1] Austrian diagnosis in *America's Great Depression*, which locates the root cause not in a Washington-Wall Street political failure but in the Federal Reserve's credit expansion throughout the 1920s — a monetary inflation that made the speculative bubble inevitable long before any political actor could have stopped it. Ammous[^2], writing in *The Bitcoin Standard*, reinforces this reading with the figure that the money supply expanded by 68.1% between 1921 and 1929 against a gold stock growth of only 15%, arguing that asset-price inflation was the predictable consequence of monetary policy, not of insufficient regulation. Huerta de Soto[^3], in *Dinero, credito bancario y ciclos economicos*, supplies the banking-system data that underlies both: more than 5,000 banks failed or suspended payments between 1929 and 1932, a figure that points to systemic fragility built into fractional-reserve credit expansion rather than to any single political miscalculation. Read together, these three roster economists suggest that Sorkin's political narrative, while accurate at the level of events, may be treating the symptoms of a monetary disorder as if they were its cause — a distinction with significant implications for how readers trained in Catholic social thought evaluate the book's policy conclusions. ## References 1. Rothbard, Murray (2000). *America's Great Depression*. Introduction. — 'nearly two-thirds, or 600,000, were trading on margin; that is, on funds they either did not possess or could not easily produce' 2. Ammous, Saifedean (2018). *The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking*. — 'the money supply expanded by 68.1% over the period of 1921-29 while the gold stock only expanded by 15%' 3. Huerta de Soto, Jesus (2006). *Dinero, credito bancario y ciclos economicos*. — 'más de 5.000 bancos quebraron o suspendieron pagos entre 1929 y 1932'

✓ Strengths

• ✓Examines the civic failures of Washington and Wall Street with enough specificity to train the reader in political prudence — the book names actors, decisions, and sequences rather than offering a generalized narrative of systemic failure.
• ✓The arc from speculative excess to systemic collapse illustrates the Thomistic insight that disordered desire at scale (concupiscence translated into institutional behavior) has structural consequences that reach far beyond the individual actor.
• ✓Sorkin's focus on the Washington-Wall Street conflict invites readers to distinguish legitimate authority from captured authority — a distinction central to any Catholic understanding of justice in public life.
• ✓The historical reconstruction exercises the reader's memory as a virtue: events of 1929 are not a curiosity but a reference point for judging analogous present conditions.
• ✓The book implicitly argues that the failure of foresight — not merely greed — is what turned a correctable market panic into a decade-long catastrophe, making prudence-as-foresight the book's operative moral category.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠Sorkin writes from within the secular financial-journalism tradition; the book offers no account of moral formation or interior disorder, treating the crisis primarily as an institutional and political failure rather than tracing it to the disordered appetites of specific actors or the systemic incentive structures that rewarded speculation over stewardship.
• ⚠The Washington-Wall Street framing risks reducing a complex moral event to a political blame game; readers formed in Catholic social thought will need to supplement the book with an account of subsidiarity and the common good that Sorkin does not supply.
• ⚠No theological or anthropological framework is offered for why patterns of speculative excess recur; the book diagnoses symptoms without a doctrine of the person capable of explaining the root disorder.