> Beyond the intrinsic difficulty of revivifying the top-hatted dead, Sorkin’s rendition is limited by his desire to frame 1929 as a story about people. His focus on individuals comes at the expense of analysis—particularly of the deeper economic forces that made the crash likely, if not inevitable. Sorkin is more interested in how the crisis felt than why it happened. He has little to say about why the government failed to take any meaningful steps to prevent it—or why, unlike in 2008, its responses failed so spectacularly.
Sigh. This reviewer, Jacob Weisberg, is sadly either unfamiliar with the basics of major economic theories, or simply didn't connect the dots.
> or why, unlike in 2008, its responses failed so spectacularly.
Keynesian economics, which heavily influenced the 2008 response (fiscal stimulus part) to the financial crisis, didn't exist in useful form until 6 years after 1929.
John Maynard Keynes’s book 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money', which is the foundational text of the field, came out in 1936.
Additionally, on the monetary expansion side of things, Bernanke’s 2013 history of U.S. central banking [1] is useful: he says the Fed may have suffered less from lack of leadership than from the lack of an adequate intellectual framework for understanding what was happening, and that the dominant framework in place pushed them toward the wrong conclusions about whether aggressive expansion was needed or legitimate. And so monetary expansion attempts didn't occur until 1931/1932. Quantitative Easing, made famous in 2008, is a refinement on monetary expansion, I think.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke201...