A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined a Nation

This is one of those rare narratives of economic history from a stock market perspective. And one which has identified the causes and consequences of all the five modern stock market crashes in the US along with lessons for future. A must read for all the professionals: practitioners and policy makers alike!

Like:A. ContentDislike:Quality of cover and paper. Could have been better!

This book is very useful for investors to understand the extreme market bubbles and how they burst. Well written and enjoyable to read.

The author works for a news station that shares a different point of view than I do typically and I expected their point of view to bleed over into his work. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book had very little political bias to it. He did call stupid by it's name but it was not in the name of politics, just in the name of stupid.I've always fancied myself a history buff but Nations enlightened me on much I wasn't aware of before. Much of the history (or maybe I should say mystery) of the way things happened during these crashes was brought out and it makes sense out of things that never made sense before. The way he intermingles personal episodes of the historical players involved with the actions that changed the world make this book a very readable and incredibly informative. The worst part of this book was when I finished it. I wanted it to go on longer.You don't even have to be interested in the financial markets to enjoy this book. If you're interested in politics, understanding what happened during these crashes and what brought them on explains the legislation that followed so many of these events.This is a must read imho.

Liked how complex issues were presented in an easy, entertaing but not simplistic way.A reader will definetely expand knowoedge base as a result

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book, and it gave me a much better overview and breadth of knowledge on the subject than I had previously. I see in other reviews that some didn't like his focus on specific people, but I found this helpful as it helped humanize some of the specific forces that led to huge issues for Wall Street as well as being more enjoyable to read as it resembled something of a narrative.One other reviewer smartly noted that, contra the book's title, this work is largely a history of Wall Street, and not necessarily a larger history of the US, and I think that point is well-stated. As I recall, all of the chapters end more or less when the author decided that official crash was over, and the chapters don't necessarily go into broader societal issues that occurred as a result. With that said, the author does give a little societal information in subsequent chapters, so it's not purely a Wall Street history.The only other item that made some of the reading a bit of a slog (and why I gave four stars instead of five) is that the author will spend swaths of chapters writing things like, "On such and such a date, the market closed another x% down, and on the following date it fell another x%, which brought the market to a new low for the year." In the final chapter (about the 2010 Flash Crash), the author breaks these falls down to minute by minute. On the one hand, I think the research required to enable the author to break things down into such small chunks is commendable, but on the other, for this reader at least, details about specific numbers broken down into such small time periods was a little tedious to get through--especially when I think a strength of the book is how he focuses on specific people in the first halves of the chapters and is able to fashion a narrative out of them.I think this book is well worth a read if you are interested in the topic, and the author's conclusions (this is maybe a spoiler?)--that the great crashes are usually caused by poorly-understood and under-regulated investment options, often made appealing to investors when there are much lower, safer returns to be found elsewhere (say, when the Fed keeps interest rates close to zero for extended periods of time)--are timely in an America where the Fed is again keeping interest rates low for an extended period of time. What security will cause the next crash?

Very well written book. Full of interesting facts about the key crises and written in a very easy digestible way. Would highly recommend it if this is your thing