In his account of the Wall Street crash, Andrew Ross Sorkin aims to ‘immerse readers in the moment’. 1929 is full of the texture and detail of human life at the centre of the event that brought the Roaring Twenties to a seismic climax and ushered in the Depression. Delving deep into records of the time, he introduces many of the individuals – bankers, brokers, speculators, politicians, businessmen, journalists – who ‘played a role in the drama’. It’s an almost all-male cast. An exception is the astrologer Evangeline Adams, who made a mint by advising punters to buy shares based on their zodiac signs and declared that the ‘Dow Jones could climb to heaven’. On Black Thursday (24 October 1929) she lost $100,000 and told her stockbroker to sell everything. Through such vignettes Sorkin attempts to make an abstract financial crisis ‘accessible to the modern public in the hope that history doesn’t once again repeat itself’. 

Of course, history does not repeat itself, since circumstances keep changing. Sorkin is not wrong, however, to see similarities between past and present. Over the last century there has been little sign of ebbing in what J K Galbraith called the ‘flood tide of corporate larceny’. The many recent financial scandals, of which the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers was the most serious, show that modern, bonus-rich bankers are no better than those reviled as ‘banksters’ when the Calvin Coolidge boom turned into the Herbert Hoover bust. A root cause of the debacle was the uneven distribution of wealth and income in the United States (because the poor lacked purchasing power to stimulate economic growth) – something which has not prevented Donald Trump from fostering just such inequality by giving tax breaks to billionaires. Nor has he been discouraged by the disastrous effects of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930), a measure designed to protect American industry and promote jobs which in fact deepened the Depression and provoked a global trade war. 

Whether or not Trump will burst his own bubble is impossible to predict, and Sorkin is no guide to the future of the money markets. His book is crammed instead with circumstantial, though often inconsequential, detail: President Hoover eats ‘his usual breakfast of ham and eggs with coffee’; the financier