Andrew Ross Sorkin 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

I confess that because this was a Christmas gift from a progressive relative, I had some misgivings. It does seem to take a traditional view of what happened: too many people who could not afford to buy stocks using margin accounts, which when prices fell caused widespread margin calls, which caused immediate selling pressure, which caused a feedback loop of margin calls and more panic selling.  While catastrophic for ordinary people in over their heads (like Winston Churchill) and some speculators who lost millions more than they had, what really sank the economy was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

Where the book is weak is money supply discussion. The Austrian school argument about N.Y. Fed Chair Strong inflating the money supply 1920-28 to bail out the Bank of England is not examined although he acknowledges that inflation in the 1920s played a part in creating the bubble.

Where it is strong is describing the people involved in the disaster: their quirks, their weaknesses, their greed and sometimes their well-intentioned efforts to prevent the disaster and then to alleviate it. That many of the speculators and political figures who created the Federal Reserve System were Democrats who tried to blame Hoover as a distraction from their roles in this is not subtly mentioned. Hoover comes across as a well-meaning person who got stuck with a mess properly blamed on Coolidge, Harding, and a lot of greedy, shortsighted speculators.

I am about halfway through.