The great crash how the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into depression

By This Is Money Updated: The past can be deceptive, writes FT comment and analysis editor Brian Groom. It lulls us with familiarity — never more so than in the current financial crisis, when historical parallels abound. Easy credit, low interest rates, excessive leverage and financial ingenuity have lain behind this and so many episodes of destructive exuberance. Occasionally, though, odd facts bring you up short and disrupt easy assumptions about human behaviour.

One such moment occurs halfway through Selwyn Parker's The Great Crash: How the Stock Market Crash of Plunged the World into Depression.

It is September and Philip Snowden, chancellor of the exchequer in the UK's coalition government, has unveiled an austerity budget in a desperate effort to balance the books and halt a run on sterling Given the events of the past few weeks, Selwyn Parker's sprightly new history could hardly be better timed, writes Dominic Sandbrook in the Telegraph. If nothing else, Parker's account of the Crash of bears out Mark Twain's famous remark that if history does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes.

The Great Crash: How the Stock Market Crash of Plunged the World into Depression | Daily Mail Online

Then, as now, the path to disaster was paved with the colossal hubris of bankers and brokers. The Chrysler Building was finished in autumn , but it turned out that another architect had just finished a skyscraper on Wall Street that was a few feet taller. So Chrysler commissioned a foot spire to ensure his building took the record. On October 23 the spire was hoisted into place. The next morning, with gloriously cruel irony, the stock market crashed.

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