1929 Quotes

“We all love a good story, a concise explanation of how the world works. We all love an easy buck. Temptation has driven human folly for centuries, whether the serpent in the Garden of Eden or the market manias of cryptocurrency or artificial intelligence. Each wave seduces us into thinking that we’ve learned from history and, this time, we can’t be fooled. Then it happens again. This is how it happened in 1929.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“The almost singular through line behind every major financial crisis is one thing: debt.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“The past five years of an almost constantly rising stock market had made the life of a short seller like Livermore feel almost impossible—”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“the market never stands still. It acts like the ocean. There are waves of accumulation and distribution. The market always tells you when you are wrong. So let’s leave it to the market to tell its own story—”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“That the country’s banking system is tossing about today without its helm being under the control of its pilots gives cause for deep concern,” Warburg said.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“But by encouraging speculation and promising outsized returns to a new class of investors who had never before participated in markets they barely understood”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“There were plenty of opportunities to arrest the forces of speculation before they got out of hand. The long answer is that it would have taken almost divine prescience to look beyond the short-term incentives for making money and focus instead on the long-term consequences.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Every stock is like a human being: it has a personality”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“One thing that Pecora had mastered during his years in the courtroom was a knack for seizing on certain details that made his targets look utterly guilty and disreputable”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“The worst thing Roosevelt could do as an incoming president inheriting a catastrophic economy was to sully himself with the old administration’s failures. Roosevelt needed a clean slate.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“One of his biggest ideas was to break up the commercial lending side of banks from the investment banking side—the part of the bank that dealt with the stock market and underwritings and mergers. That way the stock traders and speculators wouldn’t endanger the bank accounts of ordinary Americans who kept their money in commercial banks.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Glass’s view was that companies had issued stock for the purpose of raising funds to make loans right back into the stock market and that Wall Street was fully complicit in this circular flow of capital”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Later he would coin the term “paradox of thrift” to explain how people’s natural impulse to save money during times of economic uncertainty has the effect of worsening the economy because no one is spending. This”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“It will send back to work many people who have been sitting around brokerage offices for a year or so on the trail of easy money,” he said. “I have heard thousands of reports of merchants”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“The protracted bull market in stocks seems to have passed all bounds. I think it is diverting too much credit from business but above all it is diverting the attention of the people from their work to gambling.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Both Behn and Mitchell had their futures tied to deals yet to be approved—Behn’s”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Though Raskob couldn’t come right out and admit that the market was overheated—he had far too much exposure to express anything other than bullish sentiments—he clearly had concerns about where prices were heading.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“His core belief was that Wall Street speculators did nothing to help the country’s economy but rather siphoned off capital that should go to building manufacturing plants and providing jobs.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Durant’s favorite gambit was to quietly run up the price of a stock”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“I always want to pay more than the going rate because I want to be in the position to demand more than ordinary service. Get a good man and pay him more than he asks”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“The way the Fed had been set up was the result of a political compromise between big-city industrialists and financiers—who believed that the country needed a strong national bank to set borrowing rates”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Americans no longer had to save for the goods they wanted. Borrowing became a habit”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“That’s how confidence—the lifeblood of our economy—disappears: gradually”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“a remedy worse than the disease.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“The enduring lesson is not that booms can be prevented or that busts can be fully averted. It is that we need to remember how easily we forget. The antidote to irrational exuberance is not regulation by itself”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“The deal over German reparations that had drawn so much praise for Lamont and the other business luminaries when they negotiated it in the summer of 1929 had left the big New York banks on the hook for Germany’s solvency; less than two years later”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Hoover felt he had done what he could. He had cut the income tax. He had announced a slate of public works. Just prior to the midterm elections in 1930”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Roughly a thousand banks had failed over the last year. Bank runs had become almost a contagion. On the same day in November that the largest bank in Louisville went down”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Forbes approvingly quoted Mitchell’s theory of how to live well. “A man can get a temporary thrill from making money but if all he has to show for his life’s work is a financial balance he cannot derive a great deal of satisfaction. A man must be able to say ‘My work has been of such a character that I have benefited my fellowmen.’ Unless he can do that”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History--and How It Shattered a Nation