Full Title: Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
Author: Charles Kindleberger
Publisher/Date: Wiley (2000)
List Cost/Pages: $ Paperback / 304 pages
Cover Notes:
The best known and most highly regarded book on market crisis, Manias, Panics, and Crashes is thoroughly engaging. Since its introduction in 1978, it has charted a new landscape in the volatile world of financial markets. Charles Kindleberger’s brilliant, panoramic history reveals how financial crises follow a nature-like rhythm: they peak and purge, swell and storm. Now in a newly revised and expanded fourth edition, Manias, Panics, and Crashes probes the most recent natural disasters of the markets–from Black Monday to the Japanese boom and bust, from the sterling crisis and peso devaluation to the explosion in today’s technology stocks.
Captivating and colorful, Kindleberger’s writing leads the reader through a myriad of financial free falls. From the currency devaluation in the Holy Roman Empire in 1618, through the California gold rush of the 1840s and ’50s to the crash of 1987, all the way up to the present day, his sharply drawn history confronts a host of key questions: In the ups and downs of market behavior, where is the line between rational and irrational? Are the markets a fool’s paradise in an explosive world? When the storm expands to dangerous proportions, who will calm the panic? Should a “lender of last resort” intervene to repair the wreckage?
Along with scores of casualties and criminals, a revealing common thread emerges from this rich history of manias, panics, and crashes: market crises are associated with greed. Just as money evolved from coins to include bank notes, bills of exchange, bank deposits, and checks, greed likewise took on many different forms. Lightning will strike an economic environment in strife, and Kindleberger explores what happens to the markets when conflicting interests arise.
Manias, Panics, and Crashes can be regarded as a warning or a proposition, reminding readers, in many ways, that what goes around comes around. Like all true classics, Kindleberger’s book remains timely–for better or for worse. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.