Boom and Bust

A Global History of Financial Bubbles

By: William Quinn, John D. Turner

Narrated by: Roger Clark

Why do stock and housing markets sometimes experience amazing booms followed by massive busts, and why is this happening more and more frequently? In order to answer these questions, William Quinn and John D. Turner take us on a riveting ride through the history of financial bubbles, visiting, among other places, Paris and London in 1720, Latin America in the 1820s, Melbourne in the 1880s, New York in the 1920s, Tokyo in the 1980s, Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and Shanghai in the 2000s. As they do so, they help us understand why bubbles happen and why some have catastrophic economic, social, and political consequences while others have actually benefited society. They reveal that bubbles start when investors and speculators react to new technology or political initiatives, showing that our ability to predict future bubbles will ultimately come down to being able to predict these sparks.

©2020 Cambridge University Press (P)2021 Tantor

better prepared to spot a bubble

after getting burned from two bubbles, i became determined to become less of an idiot and study how to spot a bubble and what they have in common. after reading this book i feel better prepared to avoid one in the future. i listened to this book twice as it has a lot of details that are hard to follow if you arent paying full attention. i do wish audible provided a pdf as there are graphs that are mentioned but are not available for you to see. for this reason i usually buy regular books when the subject is finance.

Bombastic narrator. How about Simon Vance?

Roger Clark, my god! What a bombastic narrator! Couldn’t the producers considered someone like Simon Vance?

A diagram book without diagrams

The book assumes some basic economy knowledge and basicly a collection of case studies of historical economic bubbles.

It is hard enough to "listen to numbers", it is very shameful the book had no accompanying PDF with figures, as many audiobooks have, as dozens are refenced in the audio.