October 7, 2025 • 44 mins
Imagine the Roaring Twenties, but with cable news, Bitcoin, and orange hair. In an exclusive first-out interview, Andrew Ross Sorkin joins Rick to discuss his new book '1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation' (out 10/14/25), which shows the collision course between Wall Street excess and regulatory failure that sparked the Great Depression. Today, Trump’s tariff tantrums are gutting supply chains, midwestern farmers are losing land, inflation is gobbling up paychecks, and the rich are floating above it all. If the Dow falling hard looks familiar, that’s because history is being regurgitated on fast forward — and MAGA’s version is dumber, uglier, and louder.
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You can find Andrew Ross Sorkin @andrewrsorkin on X, and pick up his new book “1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History," wherever fine books are sold.
Follow Rick Wilson at @TheRickWilson on X and @therickwilson.bsky.social on Bluesky, and subscribe to his Substack at therickwilson.substack.com.
Join the fight with the Lincoln Project at www.lincolnproject.us and follow LP on X at @ProjectLincoln. If you'd like to help us continue our critical work, visit https://action.lincolnproject.us/helplp to make a difference.
•
•
•
•
You can find Andrew Ross Sorkin @andrewrsorkin on X, and pick up his new book “1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History," wherever fine books are sold.
Follow Rick Wilson at @TheRickWilson on X and @therickwilson.bsky.social on Bluesky, and subscribe to his Substack at therickwilson.substack.com.
Join the fight with the Lincoln Project at www.lincolnproject.us and follow LP on X at @ProjectLincoln. If you'd like to help us continue our critical work, visit https://action.lincolnproject.us/helplp to make a difference.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When a thousand economists wrote a letter to Trump's All
Signs saying this is going to be an economic disaster.
They did that then to Hoover, and he said, please, please,
don't do this, but he felt that he needed to
do it politically. Your attack will not be an eavy one.
Your enemy is well trained, welly.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
But then there is not a liberal America, and he
is conserved of America.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
There the United States of America.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Good luck, Hey, folks, welcome back to the Lincoln Project podcast.
I'm your host is always Rick Wilson. I'm delighted to
be joined by Andrew Ross Sorkin today. You know Andrew
ross Orkin from Deal Book. You know him from MSNBC,
you know him from CNBC. You know him as the
author of Too Big to Fail. And now he has
a tremendous and terrifying new book called nineteen twenty nine,
(00:55):
Inside the Greatest Crash in History and how it shattered
in Nation. So, Andrew, I want to jump right in
to this because I've been reading this book and it
is I'm hearing all those I'm seeing some of those
same whispers we hear today of this time, it's different.
The market's too strong to fall, nothing could go wrong,
what could possibly change the direction up? Up and up?
(01:19):
And that was not the case then. And I want
to talk about the history first, and then later in
the conversation tie it in a little bit more to
what's happening now. So tell us about this book, and
tell us about the shattering impact though nineteen twenty nine
crash had on America, not only economically and financially, but psychologically.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
And I would even argue politically. Look, it's interesting because
when I first started this project, I actually wasn't looking
for parallels. All I wanted to do was write at
a tale. I wanted to bring the reader inside the
room for the first time, so they could actually see
who the characters were and what they were saying, and
what their motivations were. And I thought if we could,
(02:00):
if we could actually see that story, we could understand
a lot more about what had what had happened earlier.
The truth was, I didn't know an enormous amount about
nineteen twentynine. I think most of us sort of a
vague notion that something bad happened in nineteen twenty nine.
And I always loved books that, you know, read like dramas,
(02:20):
you know, Barbarians at the Gate or Dana Fives or
so many of these sort of fabulous sort of insider books,
by the way, some of the Bob Woodward books, And
I thought, has anybody done that to nineteen twenty nine?
So that's really what this was about. But in terms
of going back in history and really thinking about that,
that moment and that period, which oddly, as I said,
(02:43):
it wasn't intentional, I think more and more it seems
to mirror this period. I think it was a generational
change happening in the nineteen twenties where people thought that
you know, we were on a rocket ship. It was
the first time that anyone was taking on credit. So
we have credit cards today, we take that for granted.
That wasn't it was. That was like a moral sin
(03:05):
to take on credit prior to nineteen nineteen. That was
a general Motors effectively invented credit in that regard in
that people needed to buy cars, and they said we'll
lend you money to go buy a car, and then
Sears Roebucks said hey, we'll do the same for appliances.
And then a guy named Charlie Mitchell, who ran a
little bank called National City, which becomes City Group decided
he too could do this on Wall Street and you
(03:27):
could walk into a brokerage and you could put down
a dollar and they would lend you ten dollars to
buy stock. And at that time, there were brokerages popping
up around the country on the corners of the streets
the way there are Starbucks today. And you would it
was like a national pastime. You would walk in and
the stock market kept going up and up and up.
Nineteen twenty eight, people think about nine twenty twenty eight,
(03:51):
the stock market had gone up forty eight percent. And
so if you were doing this, it was like free money.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
And it wasn't just that it wasn't just a flush
of credit suddenly into the market that coused this. It
was also that, you know that that period, we're ten
years out of the worst devastation in World War One.
The industrialization of America is racing race along. Technology is
entering the picture. You know, telegraph and radio and telephone
(04:20):
have entered into reshaping the technological landscape. And I guess
there was like a sense of optimism there that just
could not be shaken by any appraisal of risk. There
have never been in the lifetimes of most of those
folks anything like this sort of an uplift, and so
they didn't anticipate anything like the scope of the crash,
(04:42):
right that.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And I think they also thought to the extent that
they were aware of panics nineteen oh seven was one
sure that you know, we had created the Federal Reserve
in nineteen thirteen, which is supposed to prevent these things
from happening. So there were lots of sort of component
parts to that moment. And you know, you talked about
telephone and also about you know, radio, you know, we
(05:08):
talk about AI today. I was going to say, like
back then, in video was like the meme stock. I'm sorry,
RCA was like the meme stock of the era. RCA
would have been like in video today. And so people
both thought. It was just a real shift in terms
of how people thought, and therefore everybody thought, I have
to get in. And it was also a time where
(05:31):
the media actually played a huge role in this, because
all of a sudden, these business leaders are showing up
on the cover of magazines the way Babe Ruth and
Charles Lindberg used to, All of a sudden, Wall Street
CEOs are now are now. They're the same way I
think we would look and you know, look at an
Elon Musk or you know, Steve Jobs or all of
these other guys who've been lionized, and everybody wanted in it.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It did seem to be the sort of defining characteristic of.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
That of you know, the the media aspect of the
finance world suddenly got very front and center.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
There were people that were seen as financier types, Wall
Street types, I think for the first time that weren't
connected to like industrial growth. There were always like, you know,
barons of industry types that were in the media, but
this did. This was a period where suddenly it was
the guys who were manipulating money on Wall Street who
were getting famous as well.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
I mean, Bernard Baruch was in name. There was a
guy named John Raskob, who I would argue is almost
like Elon Musk today, who was right, you know, he
was involved, he had ran General Motors. At one point
he became close to him. I mean, he was on
his way to being a billionaire. There were two billionaires
in nineteen twenty nine, actual billionaires, not inflation adjusted. They
(06:51):
were like real billionaires, A Rockefeller and Ford became the
second billionaire whoever, but John Rascab was. You know, this
was one of these guys. The press would eat up
anything he said. They would rush over to his office
to talk to him. It was literally like an Elon
Musk kind of situation. And then, by the way, he
(07:13):
doesn't own the equivalent of Twitter, but he actually gets
involved in politics, ends up going after Hoover in all
sorts of crazy ways, and then and then builds the
equivalent of what would have been a rocket ship back then.
He was responsible for creating the Empire state Bleman in
that year. And he also happens to have thirteen children,
which is not that far off from from.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Evon right, Elon may have exceeded that number by now.
You never there's always another one popping up somewhere. You know,
if you're like us, you're delighted that fall is finally here.
Things start to slow down a little bit in the fall.
They become calmer, and you get that instinct, like I
think everybody does, to sort of nest a little bit,
(07:56):
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so hecked. You're traveling, you're at the beach, you're at parties,
all but tim that's fading down now a little bit,
and we're wearing that phase of the year where comfort
and ritual and companionship are really important. It was funny.
(08:17):
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in this absolute bubble of uncanny optimism, what were the
early signs. What were the cracks that were appearing out there?
But what were the things that people that people didn't spot,
(11:13):
that that should have warned them at the time of
a coming crash.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Well, look, there were I don't want to say that
they couldn't spot them, because the truth is, and this
is again weirdly parallel to now, there was a massive
debate going on inside the Federal Reserve in the fall,
in the spring of nineteen twenty nine about whether they
should lower or raise interest rates to try to snuff
this whole situation out. And they were so worried actually
(11:41):
at the time a little bit about their own independence
and the political pressures at the time about what they
could or could not do about it. And you had
all sorts of different competing players. You're chiming in. Charlie Mitchell,
the banker at Nashville City, was almost like Donald Trump.
He was saying, no, no, no, we need lower interest rates.
Lower the interest rates, please.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
What we really want to do. And I think I
can speak for Tim and I think I can speak
for the entire Senate, we can.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Speak for everybody.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
Frankly, is we want to see interest rates come down.
Our country is booming, and the interest rates is a
final little notch. And if you look at Europe, they've
lowered eleven times, eleven times in a short period of time.
We've lowered zero. And you know they are competition. Although
we're in the process of probably making a very good
(12:32):
deal with them too. They want to make it deal
very badly, very badly. So we're making a deal. We
just completed our deal with Indonesia, we just completed our
deal with the Philippines. We're making unbelievable deals and the
money is pouring in. We want to get interest rates.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Then at some point does the level of interest rates
now slow economic growth?
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Yeah, it never helps it. If it's high, never helps it. Well,
it's already as good as we're doing. Think of how
well would be doing, would be like a rocket ship.
As good as we're doing, we'd do better if we
had lower interest rates, and we should.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
We're prime.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Don't forget. Without us, the whole world collapses. So we
should have the lowest interest rate, because you know, you
could talk about Switzerland, you can talk about wonderful countries
no debt, no, but without us, everything collapses. We should
have the lowest interest rate. And if you took it
down three points, not a little bit, but three points.
If you got us down to one, we would save
(13:31):
more than a trillion dollars. Basically, with just a paper transfer,
you wouldn't be cutting costs of anything, you wouldn't be
building anything. Just a move of the hand saying we're
goet lower interest rates you would save a trillion dollars
a year. And there's nothing you can do to save
that kind of money.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
And then there were other people on the board saying, well,
we should raise them. And then there are other people saying, well,
if we raise them, we're gonna get hold in front
of Congress and they're gonna kill us. So I think
people saw. I think people saw that things were getting heady.
They just couldn't conceive that there was a problem on
the other end.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
So there were signs. There were omens out there on
the horizon. There was lightning on the horizon at night,
and there were a number of factors that contributed to this.
Tariffs are famously part of the narrative of this talk
to us about how the tariff situation and Smoot Hawley
was affecting the mental state of the market at that point.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Well, so back when Hoover was trying to get himself elected,
one of his campaign promises to the farmers, to the
agriculture industry was he was going to implement tariffs. And
by the way, the economists hated this idea. Anybody in
a big city hated this idea, but sure, but the farmers,
they loved this idea. So Hoover gets inaugurated March fourth.
(14:54):
The day is different, by the way, back then than
it was now, yep, and he decides he needs to
keep his promise. Having said that literally exactly like now,
when a thousand economists wrote a letter to Trump's all
signs saying this is going to be an economic disaster.
They did that then to Hoover, and they said, please, please,
(15:17):
don't do this, but he felt that he needed to
do it politically, and he puts the tariffs in place,
and literally, within twelve months of putting those tariffs in place,
global trade falls by something like sixty percent, literally sixty percent.
(15:37):
And so the tariff piece, which happened in nineteen thirty
was just the next domino. You know, I often think
of nineteen twenty nine, and this book really as not
just about nineteen twenty nine, It's about a period almost from.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Nineteen Russian flows from.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
And and how the Great Depression flowed from this horrific
moment in October of nineteen twenty nine. But that was
almost the lead domino that then led to a whole
series of bad decisions, and some of those are political decisions.
You had people like Andrew Mellon, who is the Treasury
(16:15):
secretary back then, screaming, you know what, let him eat it,
let him suffer view. He was a true capitalist in
his mind. His view was don't we don't help people.
There's no helping. Nobody's coming to save the day. And
so all of the things we did, by the way,
in like two thousand and eight, to bail out banks
or to flood the system with MAP we.
Speaker 5 (16:38):
Know everyone hates bailouts. It's one thing both sides agree on.
So the question is why is there a so called
fifty billion dollar bailout fund in the bill and why
is everyone arguing about it? Okay, first, the fund is
not taxpayer money, it's banks money. And according to the bill,
banks would pay into this pot of money would just
sit there waiting while these banks are functioning healthy. It
(17:00):
would wait until one of these firms starts to go bad. Now, eventually,
if that firm gets so sick that the government is
convinced that its toxins could spread and infect the whole economy,
government officials will come in and break it up. But
just like a real funeral that costs money, there are
expenses associated with smoothly closing a business. So where would
(17:22):
that money come from? Under this bill? It would come
from that fifty billion dollar pot of money that the
banks have been paying into, So in essence, these banks
would pay for their own funerals.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Is on okay?
Speaker 6 (17:33):
So, Jessica, it sounds like the fund could be taken
out of the bill as part of negotiation that some
folks are calling for. That where would this money come from?
Speaker 5 (17:43):
That's right, And as you point out, even the administration
doesn't want this fund. So if it's negotiated out couple options.
After one bank fails, the other surviving banks could be
required to pay the funeral costs at least or the
other option is that taxpayer money could be used, at
least temporarily if this bailout fund doesn't exist, taxpayers could
(18:04):
temporarily pay for the funeral costs and it would be
paid back and that's the irony. If you get rid
of the fund, it actually increases the chance that taxpayer
money will be spent.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
That was not None of that happened. And in fact,
one of the reasons he did happen in two thousand
and eight was because Ben Bernanke, who was the head
of the FED then actually did his thesis at Prices.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
It wasn't that his PhD thesis.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
That was his PhD thesis at Princeton on the Great Depression.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
So we end up or in this moment, tell us
about the last day before the crash. Tell us about
about that last day before the crash and the day
of the crash and how shattering it was for the country.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
Well, the truth is that there were probably three or
four days of the crash. Oddly enough, it really sort
of started on a Thursday. There seemed to be a
it was a terrible downdraft on a Thursday. Over the weekend,
they thought maybe things were going to get better. Monday
opened up, it was worse, and Tuesday it was even worse.
(19:22):
And we were talking about, you know, the stock market
collectively falling during that period, you know, and within the month,
something like forty fifty percent. Having said that, when you
go back and look at the end of the year
of nineteen twenty nine, oddly enough, the year ended stock
market was off I think in total about seventeen percent.
(19:45):
But here was the thing. So many people had bet
money with leverage, meaning they had gotten loans to buy.
So when the market fell, it wasn't just that they
were losing the money that they had put in. All
of a sudden, they owed so much more money. And
(20:06):
even even Groucho Marx was playing the market, gets a
call literally from his broker says you got to get
down here and pay up, basically, and he ends up
having a mortgage his home.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Wow, to pay the bill.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
I mean, the people that are buying that, that are
buying equities on on credit. I mean it just I mean,
the scope of it now is so much larger than
it was then. It's which sort of rattles me a bit.
But on that day or on the during that period,
during that that that drop off, you ended up with people,
(20:42):
you know, dead in the streets practically or literally in
some cases. You ended up with these with these folks
who saw no way out. I mean, and this sort
of psychological impact has become almost a part of our
our national folklore about about the beginning of the depression.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Well, I'll tell you a story that actually I don't
put in the book because it's a personal story. My
grandfather who's no longer alive, Sidney Sorkin Diamond. He was
ninety one years old. He was I believe about eleven then,
and he and his brother had been messenger boys down
there during October of nineteen twenty nine, and he used
(21:17):
to always tell a story about how he saw somebody
jump out the window and kill himself right in front
of him. And for the rest of his life. This
goes to the generational scarring issue you're talking about. He
never bought a share of one stock ever. He used
to buy bonds. He kept cash, and he used to say, Andrew,
the stock market is not for us. And I think
(21:39):
that's actually there was. I think there's an entire generation
of people who actually felt that way for sure.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
I mean that's my grandmother's generation. And you know that
idea of I mean in her, in her case, it
was you buy real property, bonds or it's in cash.
She trusted banks by the sixties, but it took a while.
They all I think that that whole silent generation block,
(22:11):
you know that that shaped that was the classic Granny
with the mattress full of cash era. I don't want
to lose my money. I mean, so you end up
with this, with this shattering event. Talk to us about
how the government, how the president started to react to it,
and how it shaped the the arrival eventually of Roosevelt.
(22:34):
I know we're stretching out the time frame a little bit,
but talk to us about how the government, and I
think you could largely say they failed to truly respond
to it in a way that could have mitigated some
of the Talk to us about how the government responded
to this.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Well, the problem was that the government and Hoover in particular,
tried to convince the country that this was like a
psychological problem, that it wasn't a real problem, and that
were sort of these very bizarre periods. In fact, Hoover famously,
I don't know if people know it really he's the
one who came up with this phrase, the Great Depression.
(23:12):
He stopped using the word panic. He thought the word
panic was actually a bad word to use, and that
actually the word depression would be sort of more politically
palatable because it was something that you didn't have such
an acute nature to.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
It among the misreads of this.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
So you know, that was one mistake. The tariffs were
another mistake. At one point, Hoover brought all the CEOs
into the Oval office and you know, suggested that they
basically start hiring more people. There was a lot of
jaw boning going on. By the way, it may very
(23:55):
well be that President Trump is a much better jaw
boner in terms of getting these CEOs to fall in
line than Hoover was at the time. Though the truth is,
I think the companies were struggling so mightily during that
period that you couldn't have pushed him to just about
anything except for Henry Ford. Henry Ford actually decided he
was going to hire more people and raise their right
(24:19):
raised their hourly wages, in part, I think, to embarrass
Hoover and embarrass all the other CEOs who frankly couldn't
afford to do such. The other piece of this was legislation,
which oddly enough did not come until frankly nineteen thirty
three and really led towards Roosevelt to to get his
(24:41):
to get the job. But you know, we didn't have
an SEC prior to this. You know, people who read
this book, they said to me, well, when you were
doing the research, did you ever read a prospectus for
one of these stocks? And I said, a prospectus?
Speaker 7 (24:54):
What do you tell you?
Speaker 1 (24:55):
They didn't even have. They had like leaflets at best, right,
nobody was tiring. There's no insider trading laws nothing. So
so the SEC gets created. Obviously nineteen thirty four and
nineteen thirty three. Carter Glass, who's a huge character in
this book, fascinating guy he was. He was a senator
(25:16):
in Virginia. He puts together a bill, but how it
gets put together is wild. That it breaks up the
banks from being the sort of banking operation from the
casino operation.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Right, and which we, of course, back by the late
eighties had reassembled the banks and the casinos.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
And in fact, people like Elizabeth Warren and Frankly, a
lot of the sort of the left, if you will,
post Financial Crisis two thousand and eight used to herald
carter Glass as, you know, a genius for having created
this fabulous bill.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
Shouldn't we just tell the American consumer that no matter
what we do, there will be bank boom and bus cycles.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
No matter what the laws and regulations.
Speaker 6 (26:01):
You can't protect every Now that is just wrong.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Why look at the history. I have a look at history.
Were from the Dutch Joom crisis.
Speaker 6 (26:12):
Now, from seventeen ninety seven to nineteen thirty three, the
American banking system crashed about every fifteen years. In nineteen
thirty three we put good reforms in place, for which
glass Stiegel was the centerpiece. And from nineteen thirty three
to the early nineteen eighties, that's a fifty year period,
(26:33):
we didn't have any of that none. We kept the
system steady and secured. And it was only as we
started deregulating you start hitting the SNL crisis, and what
did we do. We deregulated some more, and then you
hit long term capital management at the end of the nineties,
and what did we do as a country. This country
(26:54):
continued to deregulate more, and then we hit the big
crash in two thousand and eight. Were not going to
defend the proposition that regulation can never work.
Speaker 5 (27:04):
I didn't say regulation never works by far and away,
and I agree there were fewer bank.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Failures in that time after Glassteagel.
Speaker 6 (27:11):
E as in of the big ones zero.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
But plim in Illinois was the seventh biggest bank, and
then I had.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
It would have failed fifty years to get.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
The the center.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
You're on the record.
Speaker 7 (27:20):
You're on the record saying.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
Glass Steagel, Glass Steagel would not have prevented the financial crust.
Speaker 6 (27:24):
Now all by itself, that's absolutely right. But what Glass
Steagel can do is it can wind some more of
the risk out of the system. It can help bring
down the size of the largest banking institutions. Don't forget
you said there was too much concentration in the banking
industry in two thousand and eight. Now here we are
(27:46):
in twenty thirteen and the big four are thirty percent bigger.
That puts too much risk back.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
In the system.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I think of they actually I didn't know it going
into this project. If they really understood how this bill
got put together, which by the way, including lobbying, money
and bankers trying to screw each other, and also of
other Shenanians that had almost nothing to do with sort
of trying to.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Regulatory regulatory propriety.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
But it's fascinating.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
So I want to jump forward a little bit. You know,
the the Great Depression drags on and on and on.
It shapes that silent generation profoundly. Roosevelt starts to get
some traction under him World War two, and the the
massive industrialization starts to you know, or not doesn't start
(28:44):
to I think it could decisively set be said to
have ended the Great Depression, and we we we kind
of Is there a moment that you, other than say
Pearl Harbor, that you think that the the impact of
nineteen twenty nine on the markets stopped really being this
like dark cloud, this huge overhang.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Oh goodness, I think that it still hangs over the markets.
I was just down at the New York Stock Exchange
last week, and they still talk about it with sort
of the same kind of anxiety and almost reverence. I'm
sure that Pearl Harbor, or at least I would imagine
Pearl Harbor outdid the crash. And I just think about that,
(29:29):
like the like the the nine to eleven. I think, sure,
you know, I think they're they're barring a war, though
I think there's not much right right.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
So let's fast forward a little bit to the to
the to the era that we live in. We've seen
the market have any number of mid size crashes, you know,
eighty six, two thousand, two thousand and eight, the COVID air.
(30:02):
Do we have sufficient firebreaks procedural things to stop another
nineteen twenty nine if the market suddenly goes, you know, sideways.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
So if you'd ask you this question a couple of
years ago, I would have said, yes, m hm. You know,
I remember back in two thousand and eight, Jamie Diamond,
who runs JP Morgan, used to tell a story about
how his daughter had come home and said, Daddy, what's
a financial crisis? And he said, something that happens every
five to seven years. Hey, So, and I think it's
(30:40):
true that we have lived with some form of a
bubble bursting, you know, every couple of years here and there. Sure,
I do think something has shifted in the last decade,
and specifically probably in the last three or four years.
Even more importantly and even and especially in this past year.
It's self, which is the guardrails are being taken off.
(31:04):
That is the biggest difference. So, you know, literally, just
in the last couple of weeks, President Trump announced plans
for publicly traded companies to no longer provide a quarterly
earning disclosures. He says, you know what, it's too costly
to do. The CEOs are not focused on their business
long term. We should only do this twice a year. Well,
(31:27):
all of a sudden, you're taking transparency away from the market.
If that's the case. You know, there have been a
number of bills that have passed now that are going
to make crypto a huge part of people's pocketbook and
bank account, some of which is going to be highly leveraged,
meaning there are people borrowing a ton of money to
(31:49):
do this. One of the bills is going to allow
people to take private equity and venture capital and private
credit and put in your four one K and all
of that is being promoted as democratizing finance, which very
much was the conceit in the nineteen twenties. We need
to democratize finance, you know, the elites are getting richer
(32:13):
and the public needs to have access. Same story that
we're hearing today, right, And so you said, you know,
do I think we have the breaks in place? I
think we have a lot of the breaks still in place.
I think to the degree you believe the Federal Reserve
is independent and can actually pump money into the system
if it needed to, yes, I think that's a break,
(32:34):
But I do think there are some cracks in the breaks.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Okay, one of those cracks would strike me as Trump's ongoing,
very persistent efforts to remove the FEDS and dependence to
some greater or lesser degree. Talk to me about where
you see that. I mean, the FED was a fairly
new institution in nineteen twenty nine, and now oh it is.
(33:00):
It is I think, probably under attack more than it's
ever been in my lifetime. I think talking about what
the impact of if the FED becomes politicized or loses
its its independence, what do you think is the is
the the logical outcome of that.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
I think there's a couple of real, real problems if
the FED loses its independence. And I think, by the way,
President Trump has made comments not just about wanting to
influence the FED, but he's talked about for the first
time having a majority. He uses the word majority as
if it's the Supreme Court or if it's Congress, by
the way, in the past, where he didn't like to
use the phrase majority in the context of the Supreme
(33:43):
Court either, right, So there's definitely an effort to influence
the FED.
Speaker 6 (33:51):
Said that determination of can.
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Not come fast enough he says, even if you.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Ask it to.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Oh, he'll live.
Speaker 4 (33:58):
If I asked him to, he'll be out of there.
But don't I don't think he's I don't think he
I don't think he's doing the job. He's too late,
always too late, a little slow, and I'm not happy
with him.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
I let him know it.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
And oh, if I want him out, he'll be out
of their real fast, believe me.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
And what does that mean? It potentially means that the
decision making would really be driven by what the White
House wants them to do, which is if they want
them to lower interest rates and goose the market. At
any one moment, they lower interest rates. If they want
to tighten things up, they tighten things up. But I
think the bigger issue at some point, and the question
(34:38):
is when the market would react to this. You would
think that the bond market, that investors who effectively lend
money to US taxpayers, would say, you know what, there's
a higher risk premium now to do this because I
don't know if I'm actually going to get my money
back the way I expected to, and so I'm going
(34:59):
to charge a higher interest rate for that. And if
that's the case, then you have a bigger problem. I've
always thought that the bond market should be the last
I don't know if it should be it in practicality,
it's the last governor over the political class. It's it's
(35:20):
you know, after an election.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Still, Trump still does respond to the bond market, I
think more than a lot of other cues.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Absolutely. And the truth is, you know, you go back
and look at the tariffs that he announced back in April,
and if you remember, he really walked a lot of
it back in large part because the bond market got rattled.
So I do think there still is that influence. Having
said that, you know, there's been a lot of people
who had their hair on fire, saying, oh my goodness,
(35:47):
bonds are going to cost so much more. Anytime there's
even a question about the independence, the bond market's going
to get upset. I also worry that the bond market
itself could be too short term orient because so many
of them are already thinking to themselves, you know what,
come May J. Powell, who's the current FED chairman, He's
(36:08):
going to be out of the job, his term is up.
How President Trump is going to install somebody else at
his place. That person invariably is going to lower interest
rates because that's what the president wants. And from their
vantage point, you know, I'm not sure why they haven't
why the bond market has not reacted differently, I understand
(36:29):
why the equity market has reacted, by the way. Sure,
I think the equity market's already looking at that saying, oh,
the punch bowl is being put back on the.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Table, right right, They've ordered more chicken wings. The next
thing I wanted to ask you about is that we
touched on a little bit our current economic situation is
I think a lot of it's being driven by the
tariff questions that are you know, in the ag sector
(36:57):
in particular, And you know, I think the tariff stuff
and the immigration stuff are sort of a hand in
hand double disruption on a lot of the working class
sector of this economy. Right now, Do you see parallels
to what to nineteen twenty nine in any of that
in terms of the things that are disrupting the market
that we know are there that could have a broader
(37:19):
and more significant impact.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
So I actually worry that it is similar to nineteen
twenty nine in that you have these underlying fault lines
in the economy as it relates to tariffs, immigration, agriculture,
but it's being papered over or most people are not
seeing it because in some ways there's so much focus
(37:47):
on this AI boom that's taking place. That and by
the way, the AI boom is real insofar as there's
real cash, hundreds of billions of dollars it's been committed
and spended, and that's trickling throughout the economy. The question
is that's also built on a pilot debt. And so
how long all of that, how long the AI economy
(38:11):
can either paper over or prop up the rest of
the economy, I think is a real question. And by
the way, we haven't even talked about what happens on
the other end of the AI boom, which is to say,
if you thought that twenty five percent unemployment was bad
in you know, nineteen thirty two, and.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Wait till AI blows out every CPA, attorney, actuary, HR
person and on and on and on and on in
that gray collar and white collar part of the economy.
And it doesn't take AGI, super intelligence or anything like that.
It's just wider deployment of the current state of technology
(38:52):
for llms.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
I think you're already seeing it. I mean massive destruction
graduates out of Stanford, you know, the graduate the hiring
is so much lower than it used to be. You know,
you probably read that big article in the New York Times.
Some of them are working at Chipotle. I mean, think
about that. Engineers that would have been coders are working
at Chipotle. Where if that's true, where where is this
(39:15):
all headed?
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yeah? I mean the the the decapitation of a sector
of the economy that was very post industrial by even
today's LLM level ais I think is still an undercounted
risk across everything, across all the markets.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
But it's so interesting, the markets almost discounted because it's
almost too hard to model. You just don't You just
don't know what it will be.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
A scary thing on horizon is scary. But they don't.
They don't, they haven't gone through. I mean, if the
ripple effect on everything, if it starts to blow out
white collar jobs, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Is so I have a question for you, Rick, which politically,
why has that not become a real issue yet?
Speaker 2 (40:05):
I think because so much chaos is surrounded Trump, it's hard.
I've talked to a few Democrats about this. I've talked
a few Republicans about this too, Like the person or
party who gets ahead of this and says, okay AI
is going to change everything. We can't necessarily stop that,
but we can start to try to mitigate the impact
on people. And look, as a as a conservative, I'm like,
(40:28):
I've I wonder what we how we respond to it.
Is it some UBI version, Is it some tax on
the AI rev stream that goes back to American work?
I don't I don't know the answer, but I know
I know the political impact of this is going to
be title it's going to be on the scale of
the political impact of it will be beyond anything we
(40:51):
can consider. And ironically, at the lowest end of the economy,
it's not going to immediately replace pipe fitters and plumbers
and roofers, but it's gonna it's gonna replace and and
some of the touch aspects. Not going to replace doctors
and dentists right away. But there's a huge block of
folks in that soft information economy that are just going
(41:14):
to be it's it's over, including attorneys. I mean, I
know I know some folks in practice at white shoe
law firms who are now planning they're gonna slow down
their hiring for associates because they don't need them now
in the way they once did. They're now looking for
people that are going to go out and be able
to generate business, not just not just you know, do
(41:37):
the grunt work. AI is going to take over a
lot of that. It's gonna it's gonna change the world.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
I just used an LLM. Someone had sent me a contract,
ten page contracts to look over. Yep, I noticed three
three things out in love in it. I put it
to chat chopt, I said, tell me everything that's good
and bad for me in this agreement. Right, it's not
only spoted of the three things I caught, it spotted
three others. The It then said, would you like me
to create a red line version of this contract for you?
(42:05):
I said, sure, it did. It said, would you like
a cover letter to return it back? It wrote a
beautiful better back in language that I probably wouldn't have used.
The letter the laguage even better than I would have used,
made way better. And forty five minutes later, Yeah, contract
was done. And guess what there was no lawyer used.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
I'm telling you this is this is this is the
political implications of it are underscored by Miles. We just
we are not ready at all. I'm I'm you know,
I am. I am constantly amazed by people who have
now got a quarter million dollars or more of debt
for a CS degree, who were about to be you know,
(42:50):
Chipotle workers for the foreseeable future. So well, Andrew, I
want to thank you so much for coming on the
show today, folks. The book is nineteen twenty nine, Inside
the greatest crash in history and how it shattered a nation.
I'm about two thirds of the way through, Andrew. It
is fascinating and it's dark, but it is a great
tale of human nature that people from today will recognize,
(43:13):
like the the the you know, ambition and cupidity and
venality and fear and response, all of it is wrapped up.
And this is tremendous read. I look forward to seeing
you again soon, Andrew. Thank you so much for coming
on today. Rick, this is a ball, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
The Lincoln Project Podcast is a Lincoln Project production. Executive
produced by Whitney Hayes, then how and Joey Wertner Cheney,
edited by Riley Maine. Hey, folks, if you want to
support the Lincoln Project's work against Donald Trump, Elon Musk,
and this MAGA craziness, go to action dot Lincoln Project
dot us slash help LP. If you'd like to get
in touch, or have suggestions for a guest or a
(43:52):
show topic, or just want to say hi, our email
is podcast at Lincoln Project dot us. For our maga friends,
please no more nuts. Thanks so much, and we'll talk
to you again next time, and good luck,
When a thousand economists wrote a letter to Trump's All
Signs saying this is going to be an economic disaster.
They did that then to Hoover, and he said, please, please,
don't do this, but he felt that he needed to
do it politically. Your attack will not be an eavy one.
Your enemy is well trained, welly.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
But then there is not a liberal America, and he
is conserved of America.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
There the United States of America.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Good luck, Hey, folks, welcome back to the Lincoln Project podcast.
I'm your host is always Rick Wilson. I'm delighted to
be joined by Andrew Ross Sorkin today. You know Andrew
ross Orkin from Deal Book. You know him from MSNBC,
you know him from CNBC. You know him as the
author of Too Big to Fail. And now he has
a tremendous and terrifying new book called nineteen twenty nine,
(00:55):
Inside the Greatest Crash in History and how it shattered
in Nation. So, Andrew, I want to jump right in
to this because I've been reading this book and it
is I'm hearing all those I'm seeing some of those
same whispers we hear today of this time, it's different.
The market's too strong to fall, nothing could go wrong,
what could possibly change the direction up? Up and up?
(01:19):
And that was not the case then. And I want
to talk about the history first, and then later in
the conversation tie it in a little bit more to
what's happening now. So tell us about this book, and
tell us about the shattering impact though nineteen twenty nine
crash had on America, not only economically and financially, but psychologically.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
And I would even argue politically. Look, it's interesting because
when I first started this project, I actually wasn't looking
for parallels. All I wanted to do was write at
a tale. I wanted to bring the reader inside the
room for the first time, so they could actually see
who the characters were and what they were saying, and
what their motivations were. And I thought if we could,
(02:00):
if we could actually see that story, we could understand
a lot more about what had what had happened earlier.
The truth was, I didn't know an enormous amount about
nineteen twentynine. I think most of us sort of a
vague notion that something bad happened in nineteen twenty nine.
And I always loved books that, you know, read like dramas,
(02:20):
you know, Barbarians at the Gate or Dana Fives or
so many of these sort of fabulous sort of insider books,
by the way, some of the Bob Woodward books, And
I thought, has anybody done that to nineteen twenty nine?
So that's really what this was about. But in terms
of going back in history and really thinking about that,
that moment and that period, which oddly, as I said,
(02:43):
it wasn't intentional, I think more and more it seems
to mirror this period. I think it was a generational
change happening in the nineteen twenties where people thought that
you know, we were on a rocket ship. It was
the first time that anyone was taking on credit. So
we have credit cards today, we take that for granted.
That wasn't it was. That was like a moral sin
(03:05):
to take on credit prior to nineteen nineteen. That was
a general Motors effectively invented credit in that regard in
that people needed to buy cars, and they said we'll
lend you money to go buy a car, and then
Sears Roebucks said hey, we'll do the same for appliances.
And then a guy named Charlie Mitchell, who ran a
little bank called National City, which becomes City Group decided
he too could do this on Wall Street and you
(03:27):
could walk into a brokerage and you could put down
a dollar and they would lend you ten dollars to
buy stock. And at that time, there were brokerages popping
up around the country on the corners of the streets
the way there are Starbucks today. And you would it
was like a national pastime. You would walk in and
the stock market kept going up and up and up.
Nineteen twenty eight, people think about nine twenty twenty eight,
(03:51):
the stock market had gone up forty eight percent. And
so if you were doing this, it was like free money.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
And it wasn't just that it wasn't just a flush
of credit suddenly into the market that coused this. It
was also that, you know that that period, we're ten
years out of the worst devastation in World War One.
The industrialization of America is racing race along. Technology is
entering the picture. You know, telegraph and radio and telephone
(04:20):
have entered into reshaping the technological landscape. And I guess
there was like a sense of optimism there that just
could not be shaken by any appraisal of risk. There
have never been in the lifetimes of most of those
folks anything like this sort of an uplift, and so
they didn't anticipate anything like the scope of the crash,
(04:42):
right that.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And I think they also thought to the extent that
they were aware of panics nineteen oh seven was one
sure that you know, we had created the Federal Reserve
in nineteen thirteen, which is supposed to prevent these things
from happening. So there were lots of sort of component
parts to that moment. And you know, you talked about
telephone and also about you know, radio, you know, we
(05:08):
talk about AI today. I was going to say, like
back then, in video was like the meme stock. I'm sorry,
RCA was like the meme stock of the era. RCA
would have been like in video today. And so people
both thought. It was just a real shift in terms
of how people thought, and therefore everybody thought, I have
to get in. And it was also a time where
(05:31):
the media actually played a huge role in this, because
all of a sudden, these business leaders are showing up
on the cover of magazines the way Babe Ruth and
Charles Lindberg used to, All of a sudden, Wall Street
CEOs are now are now. They're the same way I
think we would look and you know, look at an
Elon Musk or you know, Steve Jobs or all of
these other guys who've been lionized, and everybody wanted in it.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It did seem to be the sort of defining characteristic of.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
That of you know, the the media aspect of the
finance world suddenly got very front and center.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
There were people that were seen as financier types, Wall
Street types, I think for the first time that weren't
connected to like industrial growth. There were always like, you know,
barons of industry types that were in the media, but
this did. This was a period where suddenly it was
the guys who were manipulating money on Wall Street who
were getting famous as well.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
I mean, Bernard Baruch was in name. There was a
guy named John Raskob, who I would argue is almost
like Elon Musk today, who was right, you know, he
was involved, he had ran General Motors. At one point
he became close to him. I mean, he was on
his way to being a billionaire. There were two billionaires
in nineteen twenty nine, actual billionaires, not inflation adjusted. They
(06:51):
were like real billionaires, A Rockefeller and Ford became the
second billionaire whoever, but John Rascab was. You know, this
was one of these guys. The press would eat up
anything he said. They would rush over to his office
to talk to him. It was literally like an Elon
Musk kind of situation. And then, by the way, he
(07:13):
doesn't own the equivalent of Twitter, but he actually gets
involved in politics, ends up going after Hoover in all
sorts of crazy ways, and then and then builds the
equivalent of what would have been a rocket ship back then.
He was responsible for creating the Empire state Bleman in
that year. And he also happens to have thirteen children,
which is not that far off from from.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Evon right, Elon may have exceeded that number by now.
You never there's always another one popping up somewhere. You know,
if you're like us, you're delighted that fall is finally here.
Things start to slow down a little bit in the fall.
They become calmer, and you get that instinct, like I
think everybody does, to sort of nest a little bit,
(07:56):
to sort of be closer to home, closer to family
and friends. The busy summer days where everyone's schedule that's
so hecked. You're traveling, you're at the beach, you're at parties,
all but tim that's fading down now a little bit,
and we're wearing that phase of the year where comfort
and ritual and companionship are really important. It was funny.
(08:17):
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in this absolute bubble of uncanny optimism, what were the
early signs. What were the cracks that were appearing out there?
But what were the things that people that people didn't spot,
(11:13):
that that should have warned them at the time of
a coming crash.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Well, look, there were I don't want to say that
they couldn't spot them, because the truth is, and this
is again weirdly parallel to now, there was a massive
debate going on inside the Federal Reserve in the fall,
in the spring of nineteen twenty nine about whether they
should lower or raise interest rates to try to snuff
this whole situation out. And they were so worried actually
(11:41):
at the time a little bit about their own independence
and the political pressures at the time about what they
could or could not do about it. And you had
all sorts of different competing players. You're chiming in. Charlie Mitchell,
the banker at Nashville City, was almost like Donald Trump.
He was saying, no, no, no, we need lower interest rates.
Lower the interest rates, please.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
What we really want to do. And I think I
can speak for Tim and I think I can speak
for the entire Senate, we can.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Speak for everybody.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
Frankly, is we want to see interest rates come down.
Our country is booming, and the interest rates is a
final little notch. And if you look at Europe, they've
lowered eleven times, eleven times in a short period of time.
We've lowered zero. And you know they are competition. Although
we're in the process of probably making a very good
(12:32):
deal with them too. They want to make it deal
very badly, very badly. So we're making a deal. We
just completed our deal with Indonesia, we just completed our
deal with the Philippines. We're making unbelievable deals and the
money is pouring in. We want to get interest rates.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Then at some point does the level of interest rates
now slow economic growth?
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Yeah, it never helps it. If it's high, never helps it. Well,
it's already as good as we're doing. Think of how
well would be doing, would be like a rocket ship.
As good as we're doing, we'd do better if we
had lower interest rates, and we should.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
We're prime.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Don't forget. Without us, the whole world collapses. So we
should have the lowest interest rate, because you know, you
could talk about Switzerland, you can talk about wonderful countries
no debt, no, but without us, everything collapses. We should
have the lowest interest rate. And if you took it
down three points, not a little bit, but three points.
If you got us down to one, we would save
(13:31):
more than a trillion dollars. Basically, with just a paper transfer,
you wouldn't be cutting costs of anything, you wouldn't be
building anything. Just a move of the hand saying we're
goet lower interest rates you would save a trillion dollars
a year. And there's nothing you can do to save
that kind of money.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
And then there were other people on the board saying, well,
we should raise them. And then there are other people saying, well,
if we raise them, we're gonna get hold in front
of Congress and they're gonna kill us. So I think
people saw. I think people saw that things were getting heady.
They just couldn't conceive that there was a problem on
the other end.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
So there were signs. There were omens out there on
the horizon. There was lightning on the horizon at night,
and there were a number of factors that contributed to this.
Tariffs are famously part of the narrative of this talk
to us about how the tariff situation and Smoot Hawley
was affecting the mental state of the market at that point.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Well, so back when Hoover was trying to get himself elected,
one of his campaign promises to the farmers, to the
agriculture industry was he was going to implement tariffs. And
by the way, the economists hated this idea. Anybody in
a big city hated this idea, but sure, but the farmers,
they loved this idea. So Hoover gets inaugurated March fourth.
(14:54):
The day is different, by the way, back then than
it was now, yep, and he decides he needs to
keep his promise. Having said that literally exactly like now,
when a thousand economists wrote a letter to Trump's all
signs saying this is going to be an economic disaster.
They did that then to Hoover, and they said, please, please,
(15:17):
don't do this, but he felt that he needed to
do it politically, and he puts the tariffs in place,
and literally, within twelve months of putting those tariffs in place,
global trade falls by something like sixty percent, literally sixty percent.
(15:37):
And so the tariff piece, which happened in nineteen thirty
was just the next domino. You know, I often think
of nineteen twenty nine, and this book really as not
just about nineteen twenty nine, It's about a period almost from.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Nineteen Russian flows from.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
And and how the Great Depression flowed from this horrific
moment in October of nineteen twenty nine. But that was
almost the lead domino that then led to a whole
series of bad decisions, and some of those are political decisions.
You had people like Andrew Mellon, who is the Treasury
(16:15):
secretary back then, screaming, you know what, let him eat it,
let him suffer view. He was a true capitalist in
his mind. His view was don't we don't help people.
There's no helping. Nobody's coming to save the day. And
so all of the things we did, by the way,
in like two thousand and eight, to bail out banks
or to flood the system with MAP we.
Speaker 5 (16:38):
Know everyone hates bailouts. It's one thing both sides agree on.
So the question is why is there a so called
fifty billion dollar bailout fund in the bill and why
is everyone arguing about it? Okay, first, the fund is
not taxpayer money, it's banks money. And according to the bill,
banks would pay into this pot of money would just
sit there waiting while these banks are functioning healthy. It
(17:00):
would wait until one of these firms starts to go bad. Now, eventually,
if that firm gets so sick that the government is
convinced that its toxins could spread and infect the whole economy,
government officials will come in and break it up. But
just like a real funeral that costs money, there are
expenses associated with smoothly closing a business. So where would
(17:22):
that money come from? Under this bill? It would come
from that fifty billion dollar pot of money that the
banks have been paying into, So in essence, these banks
would pay for their own funerals.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Is on okay?
Speaker 6 (17:33):
So, Jessica, it sounds like the fund could be taken
out of the bill as part of negotiation that some
folks are calling for. That where would this money come from?
Speaker 5 (17:43):
That's right, And as you point out, even the administration
doesn't want this fund. So if it's negotiated out couple options.
After one bank fails, the other surviving banks could be
required to pay the funeral costs at least or the
other option is that taxpayer money could be used, at
least temporarily if this bailout fund doesn't exist, taxpayers could
(18:04):
temporarily pay for the funeral costs and it would be
paid back and that's the irony. If you get rid
of the fund, it actually increases the chance that taxpayer
money will be spent.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
That was not None of that happened. And in fact,
one of the reasons he did happen in two thousand
and eight was because Ben Bernanke, who was the head
of the FED then actually did his thesis at Prices.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
It wasn't that his PhD thesis.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
That was his PhD thesis at Princeton on the Great Depression.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
So we end up or in this moment, tell us
about the last day before the crash. Tell us about
about that last day before the crash and the day
of the crash and how shattering it was for the country.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
Well, the truth is that there were probably three or
four days of the crash. Oddly enough, it really sort
of started on a Thursday. There seemed to be a
it was a terrible downdraft on a Thursday. Over the weekend,
they thought maybe things were going to get better. Monday
opened up, it was worse, and Tuesday it was even worse.
(19:22):
And we were talking about, you know, the stock market
collectively falling during that period, you know, and within the month,
something like forty fifty percent. Having said that, when you
go back and look at the end of the year
of nineteen twenty nine, oddly enough, the year ended stock
market was off I think in total about seventeen percent.
(19:45):
But here was the thing. So many people had bet
money with leverage, meaning they had gotten loans to buy.
So when the market fell, it wasn't just that they
were losing the money that they had put in. All
of a sudden, they owed so much more money. And
(20:06):
even even Groucho Marx was playing the market, gets a
call literally from his broker says you got to get
down here and pay up, basically, and he ends up
having a mortgage his home.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Wow, to pay the bill.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
I mean, the people that are buying that, that are
buying equities on on credit. I mean it just I mean,
the scope of it now is so much larger than
it was then. It's which sort of rattles me a bit.
But on that day or on the during that period,
during that that that drop off, you ended up with people,
(20:42):
you know, dead in the streets practically or literally in
some cases. You ended up with these with these folks
who saw no way out. I mean, and this sort
of psychological impact has become almost a part of our
our national folklore about about the beginning of the depression.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Well, I'll tell you a story that actually I don't
put in the book because it's a personal story. My
grandfather who's no longer alive, Sidney Sorkin Diamond. He was
ninety one years old. He was I believe about eleven then,
and he and his brother had been messenger boys down
there during October of nineteen twenty nine, and he used
(21:17):
to always tell a story about how he saw somebody
jump out the window and kill himself right in front
of him. And for the rest of his life. This
goes to the generational scarring issue you're talking about. He
never bought a share of one stock ever. He used
to buy bonds. He kept cash, and he used to say, Andrew,
the stock market is not for us. And I think
(21:39):
that's actually there was. I think there's an entire generation
of people who actually felt that way for sure.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
I mean that's my grandmother's generation. And you know that
idea of I mean in her, in her case, it
was you buy real property, bonds or it's in cash.
She trusted banks by the sixties, but it took a while.
They all I think that that whole silent generation block,
(22:11):
you know that that shaped that was the classic Granny
with the mattress full of cash era. I don't want
to lose my money. I mean, so you end up
with this, with this shattering event. Talk to us about
how the government, how the president started to react to it,
and how it shaped the the arrival eventually of Roosevelt.
(22:34):
I know we're stretching out the time frame a little bit,
but talk to us about how the government, and I
think you could largely say they failed to truly respond
to it in a way that could have mitigated some
of the Talk to us about how the government responded
to this.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Well, the problem was that the government and Hoover in particular,
tried to convince the country that this was like a
psychological problem, that it wasn't a real problem, and that
were sort of these very bizarre periods. In fact, Hoover famously,
I don't know if people know it really he's the
one who came up with this phrase, the Great Depression.
(23:12):
He stopped using the word panic. He thought the word
panic was actually a bad word to use, and that
actually the word depression would be sort of more politically
palatable because it was something that you didn't have such
an acute nature to.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
It among the misreads of this.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
So you know, that was one mistake. The tariffs were
another mistake. At one point, Hoover brought all the CEOs
into the Oval office and you know, suggested that they
basically start hiring more people. There was a lot of
jaw boning going on. By the way, it may very
(23:55):
well be that President Trump is a much better jaw
boner in terms of getting these CEOs to fall in
line than Hoover was at the time. Though the truth is,
I think the companies were struggling so mightily during that
period that you couldn't have pushed him to just about
anything except for Henry Ford. Henry Ford actually decided he
was going to hire more people and raise their right
(24:19):
raised their hourly wages, in part, I think, to embarrass
Hoover and embarrass all the other CEOs who frankly couldn't
afford to do such. The other piece of this was legislation,
which oddly enough did not come until frankly nineteen thirty
three and really led towards Roosevelt to to get his
(24:41):
to get the job. But you know, we didn't have
an SEC prior to this. You know, people who read
this book, they said to me, well, when you were
doing the research, did you ever read a prospectus for
one of these stocks? And I said, a prospectus?
Speaker 7 (24:54):
What do you tell you?
Speaker 1 (24:55):
They didn't even have. They had like leaflets at best, right,
nobody was tiring. There's no insider trading laws nothing. So
so the SEC gets created. Obviously nineteen thirty four and
nineteen thirty three. Carter Glass, who's a huge character in
this book, fascinating guy he was. He was a senator
(25:16):
in Virginia. He puts together a bill, but how it
gets put together is wild. That it breaks up the
banks from being the sort of banking operation from the
casino operation.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Right, and which we, of course, back by the late
eighties had reassembled the banks and the casinos.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
And in fact, people like Elizabeth Warren and Frankly, a
lot of the sort of the left, if you will,
post Financial Crisis two thousand and eight used to herald
carter Glass as, you know, a genius for having created
this fabulous bill.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
Shouldn't we just tell the American consumer that no matter
what we do, there will be bank boom and bus cycles.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
No matter what the laws and regulations.
Speaker 6 (26:01):
You can't protect every Now that is just wrong.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Why look at the history. I have a look at history.
Were from the Dutch Joom crisis.
Speaker 6 (26:12):
Now, from seventeen ninety seven to nineteen thirty three, the
American banking system crashed about every fifteen years. In nineteen
thirty three we put good reforms in place, for which
glass Stiegel was the centerpiece. And from nineteen thirty three
to the early nineteen eighties, that's a fifty year period,
(26:33):
we didn't have any of that none. We kept the
system steady and secured. And it was only as we
started deregulating you start hitting the SNL crisis, and what
did we do. We deregulated some more, and then you
hit long term capital management at the end of the nineties,
and what did we do as a country. This country
(26:54):
continued to deregulate more, and then we hit the big
crash in two thousand and eight. Were not going to
defend the proposition that regulation can never work.
Speaker 5 (27:04):
I didn't say regulation never works by far and away,
and I agree there were fewer bank.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Failures in that time after Glassteagel.
Speaker 6 (27:11):
E as in of the big ones zero.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
But plim in Illinois was the seventh biggest bank, and
then I had.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
It would have failed fifty years to get.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
The the center.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
You're on the record.
Speaker 7 (27:20):
You're on the record saying.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
Glass Steagel, Glass Steagel would not have prevented the financial crust.
Speaker 6 (27:24):
Now all by itself, that's absolutely right. But what Glass
Steagel can do is it can wind some more of
the risk out of the system. It can help bring
down the size of the largest banking institutions. Don't forget
you said there was too much concentration in the banking
industry in two thousand and eight. Now here we are
(27:46):
in twenty thirteen and the big four are thirty percent bigger.
That puts too much risk back.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
In the system.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I think of they actually I didn't know it going
into this project. If they really understood how this bill
got put together, which by the way, including lobbying, money
and bankers trying to screw each other, and also of
other Shenanians that had almost nothing to do with sort
of trying to.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Regulatory regulatory propriety.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
But it's fascinating.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
So I want to jump forward a little bit. You know,
the the Great Depression drags on and on and on.
It shapes that silent generation profoundly. Roosevelt starts to get
some traction under him World War two, and the the
massive industrialization starts to you know, or not doesn't start
(28:44):
to I think it could decisively set be said to
have ended the Great Depression, and we we we kind
of Is there a moment that you, other than say
Pearl Harbor, that you think that the the impact of
nineteen twenty nine on the markets stopped really being this
like dark cloud, this huge overhang.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Oh goodness, I think that it still hangs over the markets.
I was just down at the New York Stock Exchange
last week, and they still talk about it with sort
of the same kind of anxiety and almost reverence. I'm
sure that Pearl Harbor, or at least I would imagine
Pearl Harbor outdid the crash. And I just think about that,
(29:29):
like the like the the nine to eleven. I think, sure,
you know, I think they're they're barring a war, though
I think there's not much right right.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
So let's fast forward a little bit to the to
the to the era that we live in. We've seen
the market have any number of mid size crashes, you know,
eighty six, two thousand, two thousand and eight, the COVID air.
(30:02):
Do we have sufficient firebreaks procedural things to stop another
nineteen twenty nine if the market suddenly goes, you know, sideways.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
So if you'd ask you this question a couple of
years ago, I would have said, yes, m hm. You know,
I remember back in two thousand and eight, Jamie Diamond,
who runs JP Morgan, used to tell a story about
how his daughter had come home and said, Daddy, what's
a financial crisis? And he said, something that happens every
five to seven years. Hey, So, and I think it's
(30:40):
true that we have lived with some form of a
bubble bursting, you know, every couple of years here and there. Sure,
I do think something has shifted in the last decade,
and specifically probably in the last three or four years.
Even more importantly and even and especially in this past year.
It's self, which is the guardrails are being taken off.
(31:04):
That is the biggest difference. So, you know, literally, just
in the last couple of weeks, President Trump announced plans
for publicly traded companies to no longer provide a quarterly
earning disclosures. He says, you know what, it's too costly
to do. The CEOs are not focused on their business
long term. We should only do this twice a year. Well,
(31:27):
all of a sudden, you're taking transparency away from the market.
If that's the case. You know, there have been a
number of bills that have passed now that are going
to make crypto a huge part of people's pocketbook and
bank account, some of which is going to be highly leveraged,
meaning there are people borrowing a ton of money to
(31:49):
do this. One of the bills is going to allow
people to take private equity and venture capital and private
credit and put in your four one K and all
of that is being promoted as democratizing finance, which very
much was the conceit in the nineteen twenties. We need
to democratize finance, you know, the elites are getting richer
(32:13):
and the public needs to have access. Same story that
we're hearing today, right, And so you said, you know,
do I think we have the breaks in place? I
think we have a lot of the breaks still in place.
I think to the degree you believe the Federal Reserve
is independent and can actually pump money into the system
if it needed to, yes, I think that's a break,
(32:34):
But I do think there are some cracks in the breaks.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Okay, one of those cracks would strike me as Trump's ongoing,
very persistent efforts to remove the FEDS and dependence to
some greater or lesser degree. Talk to me about where
you see that. I mean, the FED was a fairly
new institution in nineteen twenty nine, and now oh it is.
(33:00):
It is I think, probably under attack more than it's
ever been in my lifetime. I think talking about what
the impact of if the FED becomes politicized or loses
its its independence, what do you think is the is
the the logical outcome of that.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
I think there's a couple of real, real problems if
the FED loses its independence. And I think, by the way,
President Trump has made comments not just about wanting to
influence the FED, but he's talked about for the first
time having a majority. He uses the word majority as
if it's the Supreme Court or if it's Congress, by
the way, in the past, where he didn't like to
use the phrase majority in the context of the Supreme
(33:43):
Court either, right, So there's definitely an effort to influence
the FED.
Speaker 6 (33:51):
Said that determination of can.
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Not come fast enough he says, even if you.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Ask it to.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Oh, he'll live.
Speaker 4 (33:58):
If I asked him to, he'll be out of there.
But don't I don't think he's I don't think he
I don't think he's doing the job. He's too late,
always too late, a little slow, and I'm not happy
with him.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
I let him know it.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
And oh, if I want him out, he'll be out
of their real fast, believe me.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
And what does that mean? It potentially means that the
decision making would really be driven by what the White
House wants them to do, which is if they want
them to lower interest rates and goose the market. At
any one moment, they lower interest rates. If they want
to tighten things up, they tighten things up. But I
think the bigger issue at some point, and the question
(34:38):
is when the market would react to this. You would
think that the bond market, that investors who effectively lend
money to US taxpayers, would say, you know what, there's
a higher risk premium now to do this because I
don't know if I'm actually going to get my money
back the way I expected to, and so I'm going
(34:59):
to charge a higher interest rate for that. And if
that's the case, then you have a bigger problem. I've
always thought that the bond market should be the last
I don't know if it should be it in practicality,
it's the last governor over the political class. It's it's
(35:20):
you know, after an election.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Still, Trump still does respond to the bond market, I
think more than a lot of other cues.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Absolutely. And the truth is, you know, you go back
and look at the tariffs that he announced back in April,
and if you remember, he really walked a lot of
it back in large part because the bond market got rattled.
So I do think there still is that influence. Having
said that, you know, there's been a lot of people
who had their hair on fire, saying, oh my goodness,
(35:47):
bonds are going to cost so much more. Anytime there's
even a question about the independence, the bond market's going
to get upset. I also worry that the bond market
itself could be too short term orient because so many
of them are already thinking to themselves, you know what,
come May J. Powell, who's the current FED chairman, He's
(36:08):
going to be out of the job, his term is up.
How President Trump is going to install somebody else at
his place. That person invariably is going to lower interest
rates because that's what the president wants. And from their
vantage point, you know, I'm not sure why they haven't
why the bond market has not reacted differently, I understand
(36:29):
why the equity market has reacted, by the way. Sure,
I think the equity market's already looking at that saying, oh,
the punch bowl is being put back on the.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Table, right right, They've ordered more chicken wings. The next
thing I wanted to ask you about is that we
touched on a little bit our current economic situation is
I think a lot of it's being driven by the
tariff questions that are you know, in the ag sector
(36:57):
in particular, And you know, I think the tariff stuff
and the immigration stuff are sort of a hand in
hand double disruption on a lot of the working class
sector of this economy. Right now, Do you see parallels
to what to nineteen twenty nine in any of that
in terms of the things that are disrupting the market
that we know are there that could have a broader
(37:19):
and more significant impact.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
So I actually worry that it is similar to nineteen
twenty nine in that you have these underlying fault lines
in the economy as it relates to tariffs, immigration, agriculture,
but it's being papered over or most people are not
seeing it because in some ways there's so much focus
(37:47):
on this AI boom that's taking place. That and by
the way, the AI boom is real insofar as there's
real cash, hundreds of billions of dollars it's been committed
and spended, and that's trickling throughout the economy. The question
is that's also built on a pilot debt. And so
how long all of that, how long the AI economy
(38:11):
can either paper over or prop up the rest of
the economy, I think is a real question. And by
the way, we haven't even talked about what happens on
the other end of the AI boom, which is to say,
if you thought that twenty five percent unemployment was bad
in you know, nineteen thirty two, and.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Wait till AI blows out every CPA, attorney, actuary, HR
person and on and on and on and on in
that gray collar and white collar part of the economy.
And it doesn't take AGI, super intelligence or anything like that.
It's just wider deployment of the current state of technology
(38:52):
for llms.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
I think you're already seeing it. I mean massive destruction
graduates out of Stanford, you know, the graduate the hiring
is so much lower than it used to be. You know,
you probably read that big article in the New York Times.
Some of them are working at Chipotle. I mean, think
about that. Engineers that would have been coders are working
at Chipotle. Where if that's true, where where is this
(39:15):
all headed?
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yeah? I mean the the the decapitation of a sector
of the economy that was very post industrial by even
today's LLM level ais I think is still an undercounted
risk across everything, across all the markets.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
But it's so interesting, the markets almost discounted because it's
almost too hard to model. You just don't You just
don't know what it will be.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
A scary thing on horizon is scary. But they don't.
They don't, they haven't gone through. I mean, if the
ripple effect on everything, if it starts to blow out
white collar jobs, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Is so I have a question for you, Rick, which politically,
why has that not become a real issue yet?
Speaker 2 (40:05):
I think because so much chaos is surrounded Trump, it's hard.
I've talked to a few Democrats about this. I've talked
a few Republicans about this too, Like the person or
party who gets ahead of this and says, okay AI
is going to change everything. We can't necessarily stop that,
but we can start to try to mitigate the impact
on people. And look, as a as a conservative, I'm like,
(40:28):
I've I wonder what we how we respond to it.
Is it some UBI version, Is it some tax on
the AI rev stream that goes back to American work?
I don't I don't know the answer, but I know
I know the political impact of this is going to
be title it's going to be on the scale of
the political impact of it will be beyond anything we
(40:51):
can consider. And ironically, at the lowest end of the economy,
it's not going to immediately replace pipe fitters and plumbers
and roofers, but it's gonna it's gonna replace and and
some of the touch aspects. Not going to replace doctors
and dentists right away. But there's a huge block of
folks in that soft information economy that are just going
(41:14):
to be it's it's over, including attorneys. I mean, I
know I know some folks in practice at white shoe
law firms who are now planning they're gonna slow down
their hiring for associates because they don't need them now
in the way they once did. They're now looking for
people that are going to go out and be able
to generate business, not just not just you know, do
(41:37):
the grunt work. AI is going to take over a
lot of that. It's gonna it's gonna change the world.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
I just used an LLM. Someone had sent me a contract,
ten page contracts to look over. Yep, I noticed three
three things out in love in it. I put it
to chat chopt, I said, tell me everything that's good
and bad for me in this agreement. Right, it's not
only spoted of the three things I caught, it spotted
three others. The It then said, would you like me
to create a red line version of this contract for you?
(42:05):
I said, sure, it did. It said, would you like
a cover letter to return it back? It wrote a
beautiful better back in language that I probably wouldn't have used.
The letter the laguage even better than I would have used,
made way better. And forty five minutes later, Yeah, contract
was done. And guess what there was no lawyer used.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
I'm telling you this is this is this is the
political implications of it are underscored by Miles. We just
we are not ready at all. I'm I'm you know,
I am. I am constantly amazed by people who have
now got a quarter million dollars or more of debt
for a CS degree, who were about to be you know,
(42:50):
Chipotle workers for the foreseeable future. So well, Andrew, I
want to thank you so much for coming on the
show today, folks. The book is nineteen twenty nine, Inside
the greatest crash in history and how it shattered a nation.
I'm about two thirds of the way through, Andrew. It
is fascinating and it's dark, but it is a great
tale of human nature that people from today will recognize,
(43:13):
like the the the you know, ambition and cupidity and
venality and fear and response, all of it is wrapped up.
And this is tremendous read. I look forward to seeing
you again soon, Andrew. Thank you so much for coming
on today. Rick, this is a ball, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
The Lincoln Project Podcast is a Lincoln Project production. Executive
produced by Whitney Hayes, then how and Joey Wertner Cheney,
edited by Riley Maine. Hey, folks, if you want to
support the Lincoln Project's work against Donald Trump, Elon Musk,
and this MAGA craziness, go to action dot Lincoln Project
dot us slash help LP. If you'd like to get
in touch, or have suggestions for a guest or a
(43:52):
show topic, or just want to say hi, our email
is podcast at Lincoln Project dot us. For our maga friends,
please no more nuts. Thanks so much, and we'll talk
to you again next time, and good luck,
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