A History of the United States in Five Crashes audiobook

This book describes the 1907, 1929, 1987, 2008, and 2010 stock market crashes. Scott Nations' thesis is that crashes tend to follow a pattern where some new financial construct causes investors to let their guard down. The false sense of security allows for a rapid market run, then some event triggers it to come crashing back down. The introduction of algorithms and computer-directed trading has also sped up this process and created new vulnerabilities in the market.The 2010 Flash Crash doesn't fit as well into the formula as the others. The market quickly recovered and did not have the lasting impact that the other four had. It probably could have been left out of the book.This book was an interesting read with details from all five crashes that I was unaware of. At times Nations goes back into events decades ahead of a crash to thoroughly explain how everything came into place. It is a different approach from books that tend to focus on economic or technical aspects of market crashes.

A fascinating read, start to finish. The author details the five major stock market crashes of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. We learn what the catalysts were that triggered the crashes, as well as their impact on the greater world economy and business in general. We also are introduced to several major characters in the world of finance who had a large part to play in the five crashes. Overall, a very good read.

This is a great book, along my expectations on getting to know a bit more what I knew around stock market crashes. Obviously, it is aimed and should mostly be of interest to anyone interested in reading on the stock market and on History. If this is not your case, do yourself and the author a favor and please don't pick it up…!I am an active stock exchange investor and have read countless books in the hope I will better enlightened on my investment decisions. The process of learning to be a good investor, like in many other aspects of life, can only be facilitated and conducive to a better understanding of the stock market - both the present and, most importantly, the future - if you pay attention to the lessons History offers you. Thus, for someone who is investing from the mid-90's, I believe I know a lot of about the 2008 meltdown and I happenned to be in the middle of the 2010 flash crash (just happenned to work at one of the companies mentioned by the author). Any other crash, my awareness could be classified as total ignorance (had never heard of the 1907 crash) to some general knowledge of the 1929. The most interesting bits I got from this whole piece of history are the similarities with what you continue to observe in this industry. Be it called "Dutch tulip craze" of around 3 centuries ago or the ".com mania burst" just a couple of decades ago, they all look the same, sound the same and, yep, end up the same way. Just my luck I had to go to work to a country still at civil war one month before the Enron story (should it be history by now?) burst, when I decided it would be safer to liquidate all my positions, April 2001 :-). Great reading, quick and wit, good financial vocabular, not too technical but also not too simplified.

Clear and methodical. I like the structure with which he tells this story. This book is in many ways akin to fx "The big short" and "When Genius Failed" except that this book is shorter and more concise and doesn't deal the the interpersonal dramas as the other books. This book explains simply the mechanisms by which the financial markets have crashed 5 times. When done you will have learned most crashes have similar components like oblique products, overleveraged participants, exogenous shocks, overconfidence in overly "beautiful models" (models that doen't take real world complexities into considerations) and thus leads to massive build up of risk that they don't even know exists. And more. This book is very good in many ways, but it doesn't say any thing new, thus "only" 4 stars.

Very detailed and well researched. A full picture is given of each moment in time. A bit dry, but well worth it

If I offered you a loan and told you, up front, your monthly payments would make it so you could never repay the loan, would you take the loan? The obvious answer is no, right? Unless, of course, I called it a negative amortization mortgage. In that case, you might get swindled like so many Americans did back in 2008. I’m guessing, the fine print on those mortgages wasn’t so clearly explained.Aside from 2008, Scott Nations, goes into great depth on the more familiar crashes of 1929 and 1987, as well as shedding light on a few not so well known, like the flash crash of 2010. The author did a terrific job of maintaining the narrative and tying together the varied reasons for each crash to a central component present in each crash.I found this book to be both enlightening and entertaining. Thoroughly researched, and timely content, make this a must read for anyone with an interest in business, investing, or the nuances of herd behaviour.4 stars.

There is little new in the world of investing because speculation has been around for most of mankind’s existence. These books show how financial crises are all similar but we fail to learn the telltale signs: an asset class starts growing in value, which brings in more looking to make a killing and everyone agrees this time it’s different until it goes all off with a bang and everyone asks how come no one saw it coming. Highly recommendable read with some great lessons.

Gets a little deep, but the content is good. So good, in fact, that after reading it you realize the current state of economic affairs sounds very similar... but, overall great read. Very educational.

I don’t think this book is as accessible as advertised but even through sections where I got lost, his use of backstories helped keep me connected. I think this book could’ve used more visual breaks between sections (chapters should never be 50 pages long without sub-sections or breaks). It also could’ve used visuals. I realize tables and graphs add to the work but rattling off percentage drops and ticker numbers in prose is poor form and offloads the effort into the reader. It also made some of the profound situations that occurred during these crashes fall flat.For people outside finance like myself, I’d recommend reading other histories like Americana, or even The Ascent of Money first because they give enough background on concepts that make this easier to follow.While some of his detail was hard not to glaze over, much of it was interesting and gave me a deeper understanding how the stock market works and has evolved over the last hundred years. I appreciate the research and detail Nations put into this book.

I received this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway from Harper Collins. I love reading about history, but I got a C in my most recent economics class ten years ago. Still, Nations hooked me by focusing on the stories of individuals and the places they had in these moments. He'd go in depth into the background of some of the main players, to show their rise and fall in a few paragraphs. He tried to show the origin of some of the terrible ideas that lead to the market crashes of the past. And he's not afraid to point fingers at the men who had these terrible ideas. He practically mocks them openly for ignoring warnings and thinking themselves invincible. I admit I had to take notes to keep track of people, companies, dates, and the variety of causes and effects. And still I can't definitively say what a mortgage-backed security exactly is. Nations expects the reader to have some sort of background knowledge in order to understand the depth and detail her goes into. I probably wouldn't recommend it to someone unless they're already in the know.

Well written, simple overview of the major, well known crashes of the 20th and early 21st centuries. I was a bit surprised to see the flash crash of 2010 in there rather than the tech bubble of 2000/01, but I think it probably fit more squarely with the author’s central thesis that most crashed are caused by new financial innovations. He does a good job of describing the environment leading up to each crash while also keeping it fairly high level. Also, while financial jargon is unavoidable in a book of this subject, he does a good job of keeping the ideas and terms accessible to the financial novice. We recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about the history of the US financial markets.

Decent book, interesting overview of the stock market, and how we have absolutely no clue what we’re doing when it comes to financing a country. I wouldn’t call this a history of the US though, it was mostly just a lesson about why major crashes happen. And the takeaway is that it’s because we have no clue what we’re doing, and every time a group of people think they’ve figured it all out, it destroys everything and reminds everyone once again that we have no clue what we’re doing. Also I’m taking this moment to note that I blew a mental fuse on my reading challenge, and need to slow down on my book consumption.

I have to say at times this was a really boring book. I understand it was important to the story to show the volatility of the market leading up to and during a crash but some pages detailing down to the minute the ups and downs of stocks or indexes in points was excruciating. It reminded me of those parts of the bible that just listed off people's lineage. Overall I liked the book and it was most interesting to see the connection between the crashes, the lessons learned. But he could have done a better job making the topic a little more exciting, like the Big Short.

Fascinating history around 5 major US stock market crashes. Learned about how T Boone Pickens made his money as a wildcatter, Greece's crazy stunts to get into the EU and bad economic policy like allowing massage therapists and others to retire at 50 in a country where people don't pay their taxes, and how this led to the flash crash of 2010. Discussion about these causes was great but the minute by minute recounts of the actual ups and downs of the market was tedious and should have been shortened.