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jazz and plastic
This page offers context by considering booms, bubbles
and crashes in the jazz age and beyond.
It covers -
radio
and the transistor
The three most recent precursors of the dotcom bubble
were arguably the
- 'Lindbergh'
radio and aircraft booms of the 1920s, where promoters
hyped undistinguished assets by associating them with
radio or the nascent aircraft/air transport industry.
RCA went from US$1 a share to around US$600 a share
in seven years and then back to US$10 in 1931.
- 'transistor'
booms of the 1960s and
- IT
booms of the 1980s
studies
John Brooks' study of Wall Street personalities in Once
in Golconda (London: Gollancz 1969) supplements Galbraith
and Cowing's treatment of the 1920s euphoria. His The
Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street's
Bullish 60s (New York: Wiley 1999) is an entertaining
account of the 1960s, sure to delight fans of Michael
Lewis' Liar's Poker (London: Hodder & Stoughton
1989) and The Money Culture (London: Hodder &
Stoughton 1991).
1927: High Tide of the 1920s (New York: Four
Walls Eight Windows 2001) by Gerald Leinwand, Bernard
Beaudreau's ambitious Mass Production, the Stock Market
Crash, and the Great Depression: The Macroeconomics of
Electrification (Westport: Greenwood 1996), Rick
Szostak's Technological Innovation and the Great Depression
(Boulder: Westview 1995), David Mason's From Buildings
and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings
& Loan Industry, 1831-1995 (New York: Cambridge
Uni Press 2004) and The Damned & the Beautiful:
American Youth in the 1920's (New York: Oxford Uni
Press 1979) by Paula Fass offer complementary perspectives.
For us they are more persuasive than The Forgotten
Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York:
HarperCollins 2007) by Amity Shlaes, a work that will
presumably delight the more doctrinaire laissez-faire
fans but will fade once current hedge
fund euphoria is corrected. There is a useful corrective
in American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA:
When FDR Put the Nation to Work (New York: Bantam
2008) by Nick Taylor.
For Germany see Hans-Joachim Voth's 1999 With a Bang,
not a Whimper: Pricking Germany's 'Stockmarket Bubble'
in 1927 and the Slide into Depression (PDF).
The collapse of Kreuger &
Toll, a paradigm for Enron, is discussed in Robert Shaplen's
Kreuger, Genius and Swindler (New York: Knopf
1960), Karl-Gustav Hildebrand's Expansion, Crisis,
Reconstruction: The Swedish Match Company, 1917-1939
(Stockholm: Liber Tryck 1985) and 'Ivar Kreuger's Contribution
to U.S. Financial Reporting' by Dale Flesher & Tonya
Flesher in 61(3) The Accounting Review (1986),
421-434. Other works on the Kreuger empire include Hakan
Lindgren's Corporate Growth: The Swedish Match Industry
in Its Global Setting (Stockholm: Liber Förlag
1979), Lars Hassbring's The International Development
of the Swedish Match Company, 1917-24 (Stockholm:
Liber Förlag 1979) and Ulla Wikander's Kreuger's
Match Monopolies, 1925-30. Case Studies in Market Control
through Public Monopolies (Stockholm: Liber Förlag
1976)
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