John Kenneth Galbraith

Harvard economist, wartime price administrator and US ambassador to India; died in 2006.

The Great Crash 1929 is the standard narrative of the boom, the leverage stacked inside investment trusts and the collapse that followed, written close enough to the events to use the participants directly. A Short History of Financial Euphoria condenses four centuries of speculation into a recurring pattern of leverage, the belief that a familiar instrument is genuinely new, and very short memory.

3 books of their own