The Crash and Its Aftermath: Securities Markets 1929 to 1933

Wigmore was a Goldman partner and this is not a narrative history, which is the whole point of it. There is no drama, there are no scenes on Wall Street, there are no ruined men jumping out of windows.

What there is instead is a reconstruction of what actually traded across those four years. Which securities, at what prices, at what yields, month by month. It is closer to an archive than to a book and it is very long.

I like it because almost everything written about 1929 is a story with a moral attached, and once a thing becomes a story people stop checking the numbers underneath it. Wigmore just puts the numbers down and lets you find out that a lot of the received version is loose.

It is also the only book on this shelf I would describe as boring, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.