As a way to searching for some historical frame of reference for the current financial crisis, I’ve eschewed LTCM, etc. and gone back to the granddaddy of modern market crises, 1929. To that end, I’ve been reading Maury Klein’s Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929. It’s a cultural history of the 1920s that uses the stock market’s rise in the 20s as a way to explore the development of a culture of consumption. Nonetheless, it has quite a bit of detail about the events of October 1929. There’s a lot to be said about comparative financial crises—do they fall under the Anna Karenina rubric or not?

For now, though, two key points (not original to Klein) of how popular memory and actual events diverge: (1) the “Crash” was not a one-day event. It was a series of ups-and-downs that stretched out over a month, with some sighs of relief in between. (2) The relationship between the Crash and the Depression is uncertain and hotly debated–the Depression did not immediately follow the Crash; it only set in a half a year later and the causal mechanism, if any, is uncertain.