The Great Crash, 1929 The Great Crash, 1929 The Great Crash, 1929 is a book written by John Kenneth Galbraith and published in 1955; it is an economic history of the lead-up to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book argues that the 1929 stock market crash was precipitated by rampant speculation in the stock market, that the common denominator of all speculative episodes is the belief of participants that they can become rich without work and that the tendency towards recurrent speculative orgy serves no useful purpose, but rather is deeply damaging to an economy. It was Galbraith's belief that a good
Wall Street U.S. gold market in 1869) as well as modern figures such as Bernard Madoff who "bilked billions from investors". In addition, images of Wall Street and its figures have loomed large. The 1987 Oliver Stone film "Wall Street" created the iconic figure of Gordon Gekko who used the phrase "greed is good", which caught on in the cultural parlance. Stone commented in 2009 how the movie had had an unexpected cultural influence, not causing them to turn away from corporate greed, but causing many young people to choose Wall Street careers because of that movie. A reporter repeated other lines