‘Disorder, fright and confusion’: looking back at the devastating Wall Street crash of 1929

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book 1929 takes readers back to the crash that changed the US and looks at what we can learn from it today

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ndrew Ross Sorkin’s first book, Too Big to Fail, was a bestseller about the financial crisis of 2008, published the following year. His second, 1929, out this week, takes readers “Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – and How it Shattered a Nation”.

It’s been 16 years between books, but Sorkin hasn’t been idle. A columnist for the New York Times, he founded its DealBook newsletter and summit; he’s a Squawk Box co-anchor for CNBC; and after Too Big to Fail was filmed by HBO, he co-created Billions, a huge hit for Showtime starring Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti.

After Too Big to Fail, Sorkin said, he was “often asked about 1929. I actually didn’t know much. I had read JK Galbraith [The Great Crash, 1929, published in 1955] and a couple other books. And most people I knew, we would all sort of talk about 1929 as this terrible calamity, but nobody … knew what actually happened – who the people were, what they said to each other, what the motivations were, what the incentives were, what the lessons actually were.”