A rabble of dead money : the Great Crash and the global depression : 1929-1939 / Charles R. Morris.

Charles R. Morris has written fifteen books, including The Coming Global Boom, a New York Times Notable Book; The Tycoons, a Barron's Best Book of 2005; and The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, winner of the Gerald Loeb Award and a New York Times bestseller. His recent book, The Dawn of Innovation, was named a Wall Street Journal Best Business Book of 2012. A lawyer and former banker, Morris's articles and reviews have appeared in many publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-364) and index.

part 1. America discovers the modern: The jazz age ; Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and Insull ; And then came Ford ; Transformations : New York City ; The view from below : Muncie, Indiana ; Dislocations -- part 2. "One heckuva boom": Trickle-down economics ; From war to prosperity ; Electrifying Chicago ; David Buick, Billy Durant, Alfred Sloan, and the modern car industry ; What happened to Ford? ; A productivity bonanza ; Spinoffs ; Laggards : agriculture ; Laggards : real estate ; On the eve of the crash -- part 3. The crash in the United States: New York Stock Exchange ; The rise of Herbert Hoover ; Charting the fall ; The worm's eye view ; The banking crises of the Great Depression ; The twilight of the gods I : Insull ; The twilight of the gods II : Kreuger -- part 4. Blood, gold, and unpaid debts: Entanglements ; The gold standard ; Germany, 1919-1925 : vengeance, reparations, and war debts ; The Dawes and Young plans ; England, 1919-1925 : Churchill (sort of) chooses resumption ; The French rollercoaster ; The end of cooperation ; Germany unravels ; The golden jihad ; Getting what you wish for -- part 5. Roosevelt, reflation, and recovery: World Monetary & Economic Conference ; Devaluing the dollar ; Creating the "New Deal" ; The New Deal in overview ; The New Deal in detail ; The rest of the New Deal : a roundup ; Econometric analyses ; Catastrophe ; The unemployment conundrum ; The great lap forward -- part 6. The geology of the collapses ; The legacy of war ; The big picture ; The details ; A postscript to the reader.

The Great Crash of 1929 profoundly disrupted the United States' confident march toward becoming the world's superpower. The breakneck growth of 1920s America--with its boom in automobiles, electricity, credit lines, radio, and movies--certainly presaged a serious recession by the decade's end, but not a depression. The totality of the collapse shocked the nation, and its duration scarred generations to come. In this lucid and fast-paced account of the cataclysm, award-winning writer Charles R. Morris pulls together the intricate threads of policy, ideology, international hatreds, and sheer individual cantankerousness that finally pushed the world economy over the brink and into a depression. While Morris anchors his narrative in the United States, he also fully investigates the poisonous political atmosphere of postwar Europe to reveal how treacherous the environment of the global economy was. It took heroic financial mismanagement, a glut-induced global collapse in agricultural prices, and a self-inflicted crash in world trade to cause the Great Depression. Deeply researched and vividly told, A Rabble of Dead Money anatomizes history's greatest economic catastrophe--while noting the uncanny echoes for the present.