The Song Behind Today’s Review Title

Brothers Reggie and Vincent Calloway had their biggest hit as an R&B duo with 1989’s I Wanna Be Rich. The song peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in May of 1990.

The brothers had already had success on the R&B charts with several hits as part of the group Midnight Star. The pair also wrote songs for other artists including Teddy Pendergast and Gladys Knight & the Pips. In the late 1980s the two brothers formed their own group Calloway. Together they recorded two albums before turning their attention full-time to music production work.

Today’s review title, a line from I Wanna Be Rich captures the greed and euphoria of the stock market mania of 1920s America. Buying stocks on margin (i.e. with borrowed money) became all the rage as the stock market made its climb through the decade, ultimately leading to the financial ruin of many in the crash of 1929.

You can see and listen to the official music video by Calloway here on YouTube.

Andrew Ross Sorkin takes the narrative non-fiction route in 1929, his journalistic look at the people and events around the stock market crash of 1929 that led to the Great Depression. This is a highly readable book that focuses on the lives of some of the key players in 1920s Wall Street.

One of the key players whose life and actions are laid out is Charlie Mitchell. Called “Sunshine Charlie” for his optimistic salesmanship of the rising stock market, Mitchell was the head of National City Bank, the forerunner of today’s Citicorp.

In the 1920s there was no separation between investment banks and commercial banks. Mitchell and his bank were strong proponents of selling stock on credit - “on margin” as it is called. A customer could put up only 10 to 20 percent of the price of a stock purchase and borrow the rest. Buying stock with borrowed money could pay off handsomely for borrowers if the stock price went up, something stocks continually did in the 1920s.

Other key players include bankers Jack Morgan and Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan, investors William Crapo Durant (founder of Chevrolet) and Jesse Livermore, future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Presidents Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We follow the actions of these and several other players as 1929 rolls along to October, when on Black Monday, October 28 the market fell 13%. It fell a further 12% on Black Tuesday October 29th. By mid-November the stock market had lost half its value.

Sorkin also covers the government’s response to the crash, in both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, as well as the Senate hearings and trial of Charlie Mitchell for tax evasion.

This is a highly readable and fast-paced book, and among the best books I’ve read this year. Read this together with Liaquat Ahamed’s 2009 book Lords of Finance and you will have a solid understanding of the causes and events around the stock market crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, which together shaped the course of much of the 20th century.

RATING: Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

OVERALL COMMENTS: Sorkin has put together a highly readable, fast-paced narrative nonfiction account of the people and events around the 1929 stock market crash.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I purchased my ebook on the Kobo Store to read on my Kobo ereader.

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WHAT’S NEXT

Next week I’ll be reviewing I See You Called in Dead by John Kenney. This novel came out last spring in hardcover and was released in paperback last month. A comedic story of an obituary writer it’s been called “The Office” meets “Six Feet Under”. I’m reading this one through Libby and their Libby Reads global ebook club. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: