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Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics) |  | Authors: Charles P. Kindleberger, Robert Aliber
Creator: Robert Solow
Publisher: Wiley
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
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Seller: chrisc4030
Rating:  61 reviews
Sales Rank: 7717
Media: Paperback
Edition: 5
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0471467146
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.542
EAN: 9780471467144
ASIN: 0471467146
Publication Date: October 4, 2005
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| Also Available In:
| • | Hardcover - Manias Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises | | • | Paperback - Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics Series) | | • | Paperback - Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises | | • | Hardcover - Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises | | • | Paperback - Manias, Panics, And Crashes: A History Of Financial Crises, Revised Edition | | • | Kindle Edition - Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises | | • | Paperback - Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics) | | • | Hardcover - Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics) | | • | School & Library Binding - Manias, Panics, And Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics) | | • | Hardcover - Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crisis (Wiley Investment Classics) |
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Product Description
Manias, Panics, and Crashes, Fifth Edition is an engaging and entertaining account of the way that mismanagement of money and credit has led to financial explosions over the centuries. Covering such topics as the history and anatomy of crises, speculative manias, and the lender of last resort, this book puts the turbulence of the financial world in perspective. The updated fifth edition expands upon each chapter, and includes two new chapters focusing on significant financial crises of the last fifteen years.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 61
 Uneven and hard to read, not for the general public. April 28, 2010
Individual Investor
The foreword by Robert Solow warns you: "It was CPK's style as an economic historian to hunt for interesting things to learn, not to pursue a systematic agenda." From this you expect a bird's eye view but the bird turns out to be a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower in a seemingly random fashion. Also, as reviewer Evelyn Uyemura notes, if you are not an economist, many of the older references draw a blank. This is a book written for economists, not for the general public.
The new chapter 13 by Robert Aliber was especially hard for me to read, the sentence structure used being quite complex.
Still, the general message comes across clearly enough, when problems arise it is usually a lack of liquidity (which can have a variety of causes). The solution is a lender of last resort, a solution that creates its own problems, moral hazard.
Kindleberger approaches the analysis as a classical economist, as if economics were a hard science like Newtonian physics. Imagine for a moment if Newton and the other astrophysicists had to analyze a universe where distance, time and the strength of the various forces changed from instant to instant like prices do. I believe it would be mission impossible. Over the past few decades a new way of looking at economics has been tried, as a Complex Science, not as a physical science. The economy is created by the interaction of agents: buyers, sellers, producers and consumers. Being the creation of biological entities, it seems to make sense to look at it from a biologist's point of view. Stuart Kauffman has done some work in that direction. I think it is the more fruitful route to understanding economics.
 Dry, disjointed ramble through economic history March 19, 2010
Glenn Corey (Canton, OH, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I saw this book referenced so much that I thought I would give it a try. In addition, I believe the past is usually a good indication of what's to come, given the same or similar circumstances, or that the past can give clues as to how to handle a current situation similar to one that happened in the past. Since we are in the midst of a financial crisis, I thought it would be interesting to see how past crises were dealt with. I thought I was crazy for not liking this book since it is generally alluded to in a positive, even must-read, sort of way. I didn't think I was so crazy when I saw the other negative reviews. The one conclusion Kindleberger seems to draw is that a lender of last resort (i.e., central bank of some sort) helps soften a financial crisis. However, even he admits that there's not much hard evidence for this. Given the moral hazard and distortions that central banks introduce into a system, I find this conclusion unconvincing. In addition, as other reviewers have pointed out, the author assumes a great deal of knowledge of economic history, especially of the West, though of Asia to some extent as well. The book keeps coming out in new editions, which means some people obviously like it, but I rate it one star for content. The reason I gave it two stars was because the notes contain helpful references to other works that could prove more fruitful. Check it out of the library if you feel compelled to know what all the fuss over this book is all about.
 Great Qualitative Explanation of Business Cycles January 26, 2010
Rufus Burgess (Upstate, NY)
Kindleberger does an excellent job at explaining the history of Western "Manias, Panics, and Crashes". He holds that "the a priori assumption of rational markets and consequently the impossibility of destabilizing speculation are difficult to sustain with any extensive reading of economic history". Kindleberger then goes on to explain why the shallow assumption of Milton Friedman and other neoclassical economists are flawed.
Kindleberger takes a qualitative approach to economic history that is widely assessable. The people who gain the most from this work will typically be non-economists. All of his examples deal with descriptions of historical events. Unfortunately, most of the pre-19th century panics lack comparable statistics. When Kindleberger does use statistics he uses them intertwined with prose.
For those wishing to understand the theoretical construct behind Kindleberger's approach Hyman Minsky's 'John Maynard Keynes' and 'Stabilizing an Unstable Economy' are must reads. Minsky's work is more mathematical but still highly accessible for anyone educated in economics.
"Manias, Panics, and Crashes" is a great work that empirically shows that speculative finance alters the business cycle. Unfortunately, it fails theoretically to explain why.
Book Review from the Aleph Blog January 23, 2010
David Merkel (Ellicott City, MD United States)
Sometimes we forget how bad it can be, and then we howl over minor bad times in the markets. We may be past a mania in residential housing, but we have not really experienced a panic or crash yet. People squeal over how bad the equity market is, but recently we haven't had anything like the 2000-2002 experience, much less the 1973-1974 or 1929-1932 experience.
Two books come to mind when I think about disaster in a non-fear-mongering way: Manias, Panics, and Crashes, by Charles Kindleberger, and Devil Take the Hindmost, by Edward Chancellor. They take two different approaches to the topic, and those approaches complement each othe, giving a fuller picture. Chancellor takes a historical approach, while Kindleberger deals with the structures of financial crises.
From Chancellor, you will see that manias and their subsequent fallout are endemic to Western culture. Someone living a full life over the last 300+ years would see one or two big ones, and numerous small ones. Relatively free societies give people freedom to make mistakes. Given the way that people chase performance, we can all make mistakes as a group, with large booms and busts. Much as the regulators might want to tame it, they can pretty much only affect what kind of crisis we get, and not whether we get one. He is somewhat prescient in suggesting that the leverage inherent in derivatives post-LTCM could be the next crisis. This book is a better one if you like the stories, and don't want to dig into the theories.
But if you like trying to place the manias, panics, and crashes on a common grid, to see their similarities, Kindleberger has written the book for you. In it he draws on a number of common factors:
* Loose monetary policy
* People chase the performance of the speculative asset
* Speculators make fixed commitments buying the speculative asset
* The speculative asset's price gets bid up to the point where it costs money to hold the positions
* A shock hits the system, a default occurs, or monetary policy starts contracting
* The system unwinds, and the price of the speculative asset falls leading to
* Insolvencies with those that borrowed to finance the assets
* A lender of last resort appears to end the cycle
I liked them both, but I am an economic history buff, and a bit of a wonk. The benefit of both books is that they will make you more aware of how financial crises come to be, and what the qualitative signs tend to manifest during the boom and bust phases of the overall speculation cycle.
ok but boring book November 30, 2009
Thamanjimmy (Jacksonville, Florida)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a very informative book, however, it is extremely boring. The writing just makes an interesting topic completely boring.
Good book nonetheless and worthy of a read.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 61
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