John Kenneth Galbraith - The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)

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The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The Coolidge Bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.

John Kenneth Galbraith
And after they have started the action will always look, as it did to the frightened men in the Federal Reserve Board in February 1929, like a decision in favor of immediate as against ultimate death. As we have seen, the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds.

John Kenneth Galbraith
To a few alarmed observers it seemed as though Wall Street were by way of devouring all the money of the entire world. However, in accordance with the cultural practice, as the summer passed, the sound and responsible spokesmen decried not the increase in brokers' loans, but those who insisted on attaching significance to this trend.

John Kenneth Galbraith
In these maters, as often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.

John Kenneth Galbraith
No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Our political tradition sets great store by the generalized symbol of evil. This is the wrongdoer whose wrongdoing will be taken by the public to be the secret propensity of a whole community or class.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.

John Kenneth Galbraith
In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.

John Kenneth Galbraith
But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.

John Kenneth Galbraith
No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

John Kenneth Galbraith
Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.

John Kenneth Galbraith
A banker need not be popular; indeed a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked. People do not wish to trust their money to a hail-fellow-well-met but to a misanthrope who can say no.

John Kenneth Galbraith
However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less — and probably was much less — than a million.

John Kenneth Galbraith
To the man who held stock on margin, disaster had only one face and that was falling prices. But now prices were to be allowed to fall. The speculator's only comfort, henceforth, was that his ruin would be accomplished in an orderly and becoming manner.

John Kenneth Galbraith
In accordance with an old but not outworn tradition, it might now be wise for all to conclude that crime, or even misbehavior, is the act of an individual, not the predisposition of a class.

John Kenneth Galbraith
One of the uses of depression is the exposure of what auditors fail to find.

John Kenneth Galbraith
In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.

John Kenneth Galbraith
However, Hoover had converted the simple business ritual of reassurance into a major instrument of public policy.

John Kenneth Galbraith