
Devil Take the Hindmost
1999 · 400 pages
Bubbles are not aberrations but a permanent feature of markets. Chancellor follows the fever from tulip mania through the South Sea Bubble to Japan's 1980s, with borrowed money at the center every time.
★ 4.6

Bubbles are not aberrations but a permanent feature of markets. Chancellor follows the fever from tulip mania through the South Sea Bubble to Japan's 1980s, with borrowed money at the center every time.

Four generations of one bank, from Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Chernow's Pierpont Morgan locks New York's bankers in his library until they agree to end the Panic of 1907.

Galbraith reconstructs how a country talked itself into buying stock with borrowed money, from the Florida land boom onward, and names the bezzle: the embezzlement a rising market hides and a crash exposes.