Odd Lots - Andrew Ross Sorkin on the Stock Market Crash That Shattered America

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Almost everyone is talking about us possibly being in a bubble. Regardless of how AI investment ultimately pan out, there is an incredible amount of retail speculative mania in the air. So, how does this environment compare to past periods of exuberance? On this episode, we speak with Andrew Ross Sorkin, the editor of Dealbook, the co-host of CNBC's Squawk Box, and the author of the new book 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation. Sorkin, who previously wrote Too Big to Fail (chronicling the Great Financial Crisis of 2008), went into the archives to discover just how in thrall the American public was to the market on the eve of the great crash. We discuss lessons from the time, similarities, and differences. Read more:Companies Overpaying for AI Add to Bubble Risks, Survey ShowsWhy Circular AI Deals Among OpenAI, Nvidia, AMD Are Raising Eyebrows Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, it's been a theme in a lot of our episodes lately, but we are in an age where trading and speculation, it's just part of the culture.

We know that stocks are up. We know that a lot of things are up. But that's different than it being part of pop culture, which it is now. It's a culture of lines. Lines going up. People watch the lines. I really think that if you're walking down the street or on the subway and you see like a guy staring down at his phone, there's a good chance that he's like looking at a Bitcoin chart. Yeah. At any given moment.

Well, this was one of the things about Bitcoin. It was so volatile there was actually something to watch. There's like an entertainment factor. But of course, when you get this kind of speculative activity, everyone starts worrying about when's it going to end. When's the crash? I have this theory that nobody likes bubbles and that basically, if there is a bubble, there's two camps of people. One camp that is really upset that they're missing out on it and one camp that is really anxious that they're going to miss the top and that there are actually very few people on the camp where it's like, oh, this is like really good. I'm really happy.

I'm really relaxed. And the people who nail the timing are pretty pleased with themselves, I assume. And there's like five of those people, you know? Like that's the problem. Afterwards, I was like, oh, I sold the top. I feel good. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so famous crashes.

We're going to talk about one of them. You know, I remember the dot-com era very well. I don't remember the market environment we're going to talk about. The 1920s? No. You have no memory of that? Shame on you. I don't remember 1929 very well.

I did read John Kenneth Galbraith's famous book, The Great Crash, but there's a new book out on the great stock market boom and then crash of 1929. We are going to be speaking with the author. Someone I'm thrilled to talk to someone whose accomplishments and work ethic puts us all to shame. We're going to be speaking with the one and only Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder of Deal Book at New York, Times, co-creator of billions, co-host of some squawk box, NBC. I made that joke when he had Jim Kramer on as if I'd never heard the network. And now the author of 1929 inside the greatest crash in history and how it shattered a nation. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Thrilled to have you here. Thank you for having me. I feel like I'm a longtime listener, first-time caller. Amazing. Thank you. So this isn't the first time 1929 has been written about. And the Galbraith book, it's probably like that was up until now, probably the most. That was a great book, right? Yeah.

What was the impulse to go back and write a book about this period of time? To be honest with you, it was about 10 years ago. I'd written too big to fail. People used to ask me because I'd written about the financial crisis of 2008. They'd asked me questions about 1929. And the truth was, I didn't really have answers because I sort of knew, I think, like most of the public today, that something pretty bad happened. Then I had read the Galbraith book. But sort of Beyond that, I was lacking details. And I honestly, I went on a vacation. It's like a nerdy vacation thing to do.

I downloaded some books to Kindle and I brought some more with me all about 1929. I sort of poured through them. And I thought to myself, why can't I understand who the characters are, like the people at a visceral level? Like, what were they saying to each other? What were their motivations? What were their incentives? Who was sleeping with who? What was really happening here?

And, you know, I grew up sort of loving books like that were written by Michael Lewis or Jim Stewart with Den of Thieves. You mentioned a Knight to Remember. Well, a Night to Remember with the Titanic was a great example of a book that really sort of made things feel human. Right. And so I thought, you know what, could somebody, and maybe it was me, do that to 1929? And the truth was I wasn't sure I could. One of the reasons I think this took so long as was the entire time I, I, wasn't sure. And when I first started it actually, I mean, started doing the research,

many of the archivists that I went to visit with were like, Andrew, we've read too big to fail. That kind of granular detail. It's just too hard to find. And by the way, all the people are dead, obviously, so there's nobody in interviews. You're really reliant on letters and notes and memos and transcripts. And the truth is, there wasn't like two or three or four major archives you could sort of go excavate. And so this turned into this sort of bizarre, years-long. project of putting these puzzle pieces together. I can only imagine how much archival research you had to do for this book. It is very filled with texture and personality and lots and lots of details. Is there a particular character that kind of stuck out to you in this book? I've read about Charles

Mitchell. He's sort of the villain, but then towards the end of it, you have a sort of more nuanced opinion. So I think there's a couple of characters. And the truth is I would also say one other thing because I know we'll probably end up talking about today, like modern day today. When I started writing this book, I never even thought about today. I was thinking really about then. I didn't think I was. Because if this is the top this year, you nailed the time. But anyway, keep going. But as I was working on this, these characters to me like Charlie Mitchell, who ran a bank called National City, which becomes Citigroup, parallels to me between him. He effectively invented sort of modern credit for lending. if you will, to individuals to go and buy stock. I mean, to me, back then he would have been as famous as a Jamie Diamond of today. He might have been the Michael Milken of his time in certain ways. He might have been even like a Dick Fold kind of character from Lehman Brothers. So I was fascinated with Charlie Mitchell, and he was actually one of the hardest characters

to really write because there really is no archive. He didn't keep his own notes. It was really dependent on actually finding other archives of letters and things that he participated in. He was on the board of the New York Phil. and I was able to get the minutes from those fed meetings for the first time, and that really actually sort of grounded the project. I became fascinated by John Raskob,

who to me is like Elon Musk in the 1920s. He was everywhere all the time, philosopher King, helped run General Motors, really created credit at General Motors, which really changed America. That's actually when people started taking on credit for the first time, goes on to play the market, goes on to get involved in politics. He actually tried to undermine Hoover's reputation in sort of a musky kind of way, if you will,

and then goes to build what was then the equivalent of a spaceship in the Empire State Building. And meanwhile, I don't know if he gets credit for it, but he really did, to some degree, come up with the idea at least, or became an advocate for a five-day work week in America. people forget there were six days back then. And he thought it would be an economic boon because people would have go and spend your money. They'll go spend money. They'll buy cars. They'll have to go play.

They'll have time to go places, do all sorts of. So I thought he was fascinating. And then the last person, Carter Glass. Carter Glass to me. Of Glass Stegle fame. He was a senator in Virginia. By the way, helped create the bill that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve. But he was the Elizabeth Warren of his time.

And he used to rail for years about this thing called Mitchellism. And this idea that Charlie Mitchell and the creation of debt and leverage in the system was what was going to undo it. The Goldbraith book talks a lot about the, I guess, what were they? It was before mutual funds. What were they called? The trust investment trust. But your book talks a lot about this idea of like retail leverage, basically, which is what you described. And you talk about they would say, okay, we've taught people that they can buy a car on margin or a car on credit or a dishwasher.

Why not a stock? And it seems like they really trans, a lot of people in industry really sort of transported this consumer notion that was nascent and just like, yeah, let's port it over. I didn't appreciate that back then. I mean, brokerages were springing up on the corners of streets the way they're like Starbucks in New York today. I bet it was really fun. I always think about these physical or like the brokerage on a cruise. It's like, wouldn't it be fun to just walk in and play the market? You mentioned lounges in like hotels, women only stock trading lounges, which, you know, I would.

go for those nowadays. They don't have to be women only, but just a place where you could watch the charts. The other thing that was nuts, though, is you would show up and you could give them a dollar, and they would literally lend you 10. I mean, that's what we're talking about. And so when the market was going up, it really was like free money. And I think this was the first time this was ever really happening. And so people didn't fully appreciate all the things that were possible, let's just say. There's another parallel with today, which is a lot of the stock market being driven by AI, right? And when people talk about the market opportunity in AI, it's basically uncapped. It's the entire world.

It's like all of business. And in the 1920s, people were saying stocks were going to go up because the entire world was buying into the U.S. I think that's very true. I would actually specifically point actually to a technology story back then, which was radio. Radio. The ticker symbol was radio. The company was RCA. They also, by the way, not only had the technology for radio, they had the patents for television. And that was the NVIDIA. I mean, that was the meme stock of that era because people were buying into this future that we were all going to experience. And they wouldn't have been wrong, by the way. The conundrum is, I think the stock split adjusted at the peak was like got to $530 some odd dollars. And by 1932 was like three. So one thing I was, you know, obviously when radio comes RCA, you're like, oh, it's the NVIDIA of the time. Invidium makes a ton of money and it makes more money every year. We don't know how sustainable that is because some of that is them investing in companies which come back and buy in video.

But setting that aside. Bender financing. Was RCA making a ton of money or was it mostly excitement about the future? Do we have radios financials from the 20s? So the bad news is we don't. In fact, somebody said, me the other day, did you ever get a chance to look at the prospectuses of these stocks? And I said, prospectuses, they hardly had leaflets. I mean, and that's, if they had anything, they literally

would be leaflets that they would hand you. So you don't know their P.E's ratios going, the P. It was very hard to get real information. Again, this is pre the creation of the SEC. The kind of rules and regulations and just disclosures just didn't exist in the same way that they do today. So would you just get like a check in the mail for a dividend every once in a while? Like what access did you actually have? So my understanding is that you would get a check in the mail. In fact, oftentimes they wouldn't come in the mail. You'd actually go to the brokerage house itself. And in some cases, they would keep that for you and sometimes either reinvest it or keep it on like a leisure, if you will. But I don't know the specifics exactly of how you would deal with your dividend when and if you got it. One thing I really like in the book is all these different characters from American, from world history, you telling the story of them getting really obsessed with the U.S. stock market. So Winston Churchill, on an early trip to the United States, gets really into margin trading. I think like you talk about Groucho Marx or something getting really into training.

So to me, that was also like a great surprise. And that was also not something I had read about. I had no idea that Winston Churchill shows up in New York, actually shows up in the U.S. even before this, but in New York in October of 1929, he was actually down on the floor of the stock exchange, visiting. while this was all happening. He was totally engrossed in trading. He was trying to make money. He ends up losing money, of course, like everybody else. He ends up going to a dinner with all the leading bankers the night that the market completely and utterly tanks. And similarly, I didn't know about it either, but, you know, Groucho Marx was living in Long Island. And basically, I shouldn't say he was living on the island, but he was, according to his son, he was really living

at a brokerage house trying to retape every day. And he ends up having a mortgage, um, mortgage, home to pay for the margin calls when they called. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.

Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Some people did make money going back to our intro. Very few people managed to make money, but some of them did and spectacular amounts. Can you talk a little bit about Jesse Livermore? Oh, the great Jesse Livermore. There's been a lot written about Jesse Livermore.

Jesse Livermore is a character in this book. Of course, I don't know if we should give away the ending for those who don't know. But Jesse Livermore ultimately shoots himself in the head in 19. 141 over at the Sherry Netherlands. There's a lot of people shooting themselves in the head in this book. There's a lot of shooting, jumping out windows and other things. But, you know, Jesse was a short seller and he was spectacularly successful in the crash itself. The truth was, though, he had been super successful in parts of the 20s and then was actually

quite a failure in most of 27 and 28 and 29 because the market kept going up and he was almost out of business. and then he goes back in in the fall of 29 and make something like $100 million plus. But of course, like I think any of these sort of super emotionally complicated people, he ultimately loses it, I mean, quickly. And then, you know, makes a little bit more, loses a little bit more, makes a little bit more, and then loses, well, everything. You said that when you started this book, you started a decade ago. So it was not about some attempt to make a parallel today. Even though the timing may, things are very crazy these days, many people would say.

I've always been curious about this. Because when I read history of any sort, the brain can't help but try to find parallels to the present. I think, at least for me, it's like, oh, this is just like this. This is just like this. When you're doing the process of writing history, do you have any mechanisms in place to avoid the temptation to sort of overdraw parallels? because that must be incredibly tempting to find the details that feel salient and similar today. This is the invidia of the time. This is the Kathy Wood of the time.

This is the whatever. So yes and no. I think it wasn't until two years ago when I was getting closer to being finished. And also sort of recognizing what was happening in the moment today. And the parallels started to seem clearer and closer. So three and four years ago, actually, it didn't feel as similar. But all of a sudden, you're starting to see these debates that they're having in literally the spring of 1929 about whether to raise or lower interest rates and how they're going to

try to end speculation within the New York Fed. And to some degree, the political pressures that are around them, and you start to say yourself, well, that seems kind of, I've been hearing a lot about that. So I hesitated to sort of overdo it, but I also was cognizant that I, I imagined readers who were reading it might think about some of these things. And one of the decisions we made in particular, I remember having lots of debates with my editor about was nowhere in the book did we ever want to stop the reader and take you out of 1929 and say, hey, by the way, this is kind of like that or this is kind of like that. Some readers may see these parallels or different

things themselves. Some may never see them. And some may come up with completely different parallels. And I would love that, frankly. I have a parallel. Okay. Something that happened slightly after the crash is Smoot Hawley, right? The tariffs. And today, we're in the Trump administration with very broad, widespread tariffs. Yeah, that wasn't on my bingo card when I was writing that originally. I'm curious, how much of the subsequent Great Depression would you attribute to those sorts of economic policies versus the stock market crash itself? So I actually think there was a lot of bad decisions and dominoes that came after the crash itself that really is what put us into the Great Depression. So I look at the crash, and really only the first half of this book

is about the crash itself as sort of the first domino of a series of things that were sort of the necessary ingredients to create the depression. So, you know, when you think about all of the bad decisions. The tariffs are one of those decisions. The idea that Andrew Mellon, who is our Treasury Secretary, who was effectively saying, let these capitalists eat it. They were speculating, let them suffer. You know, when you think about the fact that the Fed really did very little at the time and almost sat on their hands, in large part, I would argue, because the Fed was such a new institution, people forget who's born in 1913, that they were cognizant of the political pressures. If they were seen, they couldn't have pulled off a vocer-like move. They knew there was speculation. But if they had said,

okay, we're going to really just raise interest rates. By the way, it wasn't that we're going to lose their jobs. I think they actually feared that maybe there wouldn't be a Fed. So I think there was sort of the confluence of all of these different things. We talk about the gold standard. I mean, there's sort of a series of things that take place that lead eventually to 9,000 banks going out of business and unemployment at 25%. It's interesting, speaking of the Fed, because these days, there's all this question of like, we're looking at financial conditions, we're looking at real economy, et cetera. It's interesting how maybe the Fed didn't do enough to curb speculation or maybe at some point didn't do enough to counteract the downturn. But they were very keyed into the rate on

margin lending as one of their main tools that they had in their toolkit. So that was their big tool or what they thought was their tool. However, they didn't really use it. And so you had this sort of fascinating debate happening in the spring of 1929 when they're sitting there saying, there's too much speculation. We need to end the speculation. How do we do that? Well, the decision they came to effectively was to send out letters to banks saying, please stop lending to speculators.

Moral suasion, right? To which the bankers said, what are you talking about? How are you to define what a speculator is? What isn't one? Some of the banks were so scared that they effectively stopped lending. That unto itself was a problem. And then you had people like Charlie Mitchell, who, by the way, in that moment, you would have compared to Donald Trump saying actually lower interest rates, please. So I think there was this sort of fascinating dynamic that you could sort of see play out.

Again, these are some of the details. I don't think I understood the texture of what really led to all of this. There's another parallel, speaking of the Fed. This might be pressing it or stretching it a little bit. But I get the sense that nowadays people feel that the Fed can come up with. any solution to any problem, right? We've seen them roll out tons and tons of different programs, whether it's for corporate credit or repo, treasuries, that sort of thing. In the 1920s, there was a sense that America had beaten the boom bus cycle, right? Because there was another crash

previously, which was 1907. Look, again, I think this is one of those things where because of the 1907 experience, which, by the way, was solved effectively by J.P. Moore. taking a bunch of bankers and trapping them in a room until they could figure out what they were going to do, led to a sort of sense of overconfidence and not just overconfidence, a sense among certain men, men of a certain group, if you will, that if you could just put the right people in a room together, we could solve anything. Thomas Lamont was effectively running J.P. Morgan during this period. J.P. Morgan himself had died. His son, Jack, was the CEO in name, but really, Thomas was running things. And he was one of those kind of believers. But I think that 1929 and what

happened in the markets just got so far away from them that they realized that there was nothing ultimately in the end they could do. And they didn't know that until it was too late. So 1907 literally 100 years before our crash, the great financial crisis, that leading to all of this overconfidence that there is just an endless series of tools that the government has to stop anything and then we get to the 1920s. You're making your own parallels now. How do you not? How do you? That's what the brain does. And I don't even like I'm not even arguing there's a parallel. I just think that the brain

naturally sees these things and we can't avoid it. By the way, we're in 25 so we still have four years. Okay, four four years. Now that's not financial advice, but four years I'm going to try and make my money. Wait, maybe this, I'm going to ask you. I don't know if there's, you may not even want to answer. This could be like a really good movie or TV show on Netflix. Oh, yeah. Yes. I thought it's very gilded age.

It's very gilded age. I had that thought, too. Can you give us a little news here? I don't have any news for you. You know, happily. You're co-creator of billion. Happily, there's a bunch of folks in Hollywood who've been reaching out recently. Okay, good.

And there's some conversations going up. Okay. No news. And, you know, that's one of those, cross your fingers kind of thing. We could officially say that we think it would be a good show. We want cameos. Yeah, we can organize that. This is a period piece.

So we're going to have to. I love it. Yeah. Tracy could be the astrologer that hangs out. Oh, was it at the Algonquin Hotel and gives out stock tips based on. The Plaza Hotel. Okay, tell us about that. So you're talking about Evangeline Adams.

Yeah, tell us about it. She was an astrologer and an astrologer who was taken shockingly seriously at that time by all sorts of financiers. Before he died, J.P. Morgan himself was famous for going to visit with her. She had an office in Carnegie Hall and she would literally sit inside the Plaza Hotel. And people would come up and talk to her, to visit with you had a newsletter. And then, by the way, interestingly, in October of 1929, as the market is crashing, and people don't always appreciate the crash really happened over several days. It was not just one bad day. She would have these almost like seances where people would come to her office.

And she wasn't doing one-on-ones at that point because the groups were so big. She was summoning the animal spirits. Yes. And she was praying for, of course, for higher stock prices. Interestingly, she got a lot of credit for the stock market boom because in the fall of 29, I think right after Labor Day in September, a reporter called her and asked her what was in the stars, of course, and she told everybody that the market was going to go up. Yeah.

There's another thing that you write about in your book, which, again, could be a potential parallel, which is, I guess, the role of technology back then. And I'm thinking about the recent banking crisis mini-drama, whatever you want to call it, where, you know, rumors about the health of the bank flew around really, really quickly on social media and in private chat groups and things like that. And some people thought that contributed to a lot of the problems. In the 1929 crash, how quickly did information disseminate and how quickly were the share price drops actually, you know, reflected on the exact. exchanges and communicated to other people. Glacially. So one of the big technological problems in 1929 was that the quote quote, quote,

big board, the New York Stock Exchange would often fall behind literally by hours. So you could be looking at the board thinking that you know what the score is, if you will, what the prices of the stock is. But it would literally be hours off. And that's if you're physically on the floor of the exchange. the folks on the floor were then calling all the brokerage houses around the country and even uptown in New York to tell them what the numbers were. So their numbers were hopelessly outdated. And, you know, when you see pictures of, you know, thousands of people on the streets of Wall Street, those famous pictures in October of 1929, the reason there were so many people in the streets, people had gone down there physically because they wanted to see what was actually happening to their investments.

Because you couldn't call somebody. there was no app to look at. And that unto itself created a real dilemma. Putting aside what was going on, by the way, on some of these boats, you know, people were trading on boats. Those guys were, you know, half a day a day. They're sending pigeon carriers to get the latest stock price. Well, Jesse Livermore, like, he had his own phone lines, right?

Yes, he was sort of like, was the Citadel. I was literally going to say he was the Ken Griffin setting up a satellite in his dorm or anywhere. one of these people who later on tried to get a faster line to the exchange with microwave towers. He did that with phone lines. He did with phone lines and his own people literally down on the floor that were then calling in the bids back to his office so that he would have better information than other people. Phone lines were the Lindy latency of the time. Yeah, they were.

That's what I say. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are at them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce. The Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.

Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast and IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, another parallel. I'm just going to throw out parallels. I love it. And you can agree or disagree. Who is the Andrew Osircun of the time?

Oh, there you go. Was there an Andrew Ross Sorkin of the time? Well, there was an Alexander Noyes was the business editor of the New York Times. And he was pretty respected guy. So I think that would have been. I would take that. All right. Interestingly, there was a reporter.

Lots of the time. Walter Lippman. Oh, you know, I downloaded a Walter Lippman. So Walter Lippman was a very interesting journalist because he was, he was very insidey. He had a very close relationship with Thomas Lamont at J.F. Morgan. Some people might have said back then, afterwards, too close. Okay, that's not a... He then turned around, though, actually, after a lot of these things emerged and sort of

really went after them. So, I don't know. There's a... But the other thing, I should say, we as a group, meaning the journalistas, did not cover ourselves in glory, in part because a lot of these people were being paid off physically, like with cash. I mean, talking about manipulation. There were no insider trading laws. People were literally going up to reporters, forget about taking them out at dinner. saying, here's money, and please write an article saying such and such stock is, you know, bound to move higher tomorrow because some rumor. Okay.

So another parallel. Just keep going. People talk about AI nowadays. And you see these charts of these sort of, I always say it's an incestuous relationship between all the different AI companies where so and so is buying from this company and then they're lending to this company and it all kind of comes full circle. When you think about the 1929 crash, a lot of it was, you know, businesses, issuing stock in order to borrow money, in order to invest in more stocks. Any similarities there?

That's sort of self-circular dealing? Well, if you think about these investment trusts, there were so many investment trusts that turned into sort of leverage upon leverage. They were like Russian dolls of leverage. And you didn't really even know what was inside of them. I don't know if I can look at fully at the AI companies like that just yet, though. I think there are probably certain types of deals in vendor financing sort of arrangements that should be raising questions. But you could look at the world of crypto, actually. You could look at, you know, strategy group is an interesting, I mean, is strategy is like an investment trust. That's actually what it is. A lot of these trusts that are emerging, that's what they are. The question

of course is. This is the erstwhile micro strategy, just for people who haven't been paying attention of the name. Yeah. Formerly micro strategy, Michael Saylor. And so there are these businesses that have similarities. Again, I don't want to tell you that strategy is in 1920s. style investment trust per se, I don't know. I said in the intro, you're like have all these affiliations. You're still doing deal book, all of this other stuff. Like, what is, we grew up together. No, no, you're like, what is your, because you're still doing all of that.

I've like paired back a bunch of stuff. I don't do TV anymore, et cetera. Like, what is your like day? But I used to wake up with you. And you used to, but then I stopped because I got tired and you didn't. So what I want to know is like, tell me about what's a day like for you these days. What do you up to? So I wake up usually around 4.30.

30-ish. I usually do sort of the final pass on some dealbook stuff till call it 5.10-ish. Oh, wow. So you just go straight to the computer. Yes. Oh, straight. There's no, there's no, yes. No, when the alarm goes off, up, up, up. And then I do squack box, oftentimes still fixing things in deal book up until the bitter end. And that usually goes to about nine. Often go on to Morning Joe, maybe talk about. little economics there and then get back into dealbook land as we plan out the next day's newsletter. And then in between all that, try to write this and I have three kids and get involved in other projects and things. So it's a busy day that doesn't typically end until the end of the day. What time do you go to bed? I try to go to bed. I try by 9.30. If I can be if I can be in bed by 9.30, this can work. Yeah. If it's a bit. If it can be in bed by 930, this can work. Yeah.

If it gets to 10 or 1015 or anytime after that. Yeah, there's going to be a rough day the next day. The next day is not a good day. Okay. Well, one of the things you're known for is, you know, you have a lot of access. You know a lot of people. What are you hearing right now? You don't have to name names, obviously.

But what are you hearing general opinions about the market and maybe the influence of policy from the Trump administration? Oh, goodness. So I don't know any CEO right now that is particularly. thrilled with the Trump administration per se, I think that most CEOs I know are quite troubled by things that the Trump administration is doing. You won't normally hear that with exception of maybe Ken Griffin or somebody like that who's been somewhat public about some things, but of course sort of modulated on others. Having said that, I think they love the idea of deregulation.

I think the folks in finance, by the way, love the idea of, of some of the things that Trump is doing, even when it comes to things like, you know, earnings reports. Yeah. You know, most CEOs I know say, I don't want to have to do earnings, you know, four times a year. I'll do that twice. You have a whole movement afoot. And by the way, this is, this to me is a parallel.

In 1920s, we talked about democratizing finance. That was like a big concept. Now this whole idea of democratizing finance in the context of putting private credit and private equity and venture capital inside your retirement accounts. and these sort of semi-liquid funds and things, that's very 1929-ish to me. So I do think there are people who like that, but I think there's still this sort of underlying adjeda.

Can you talk actually a little bit more about this shattered a nation part of it? Like, what does it mean? There was a big downturn. We all know about the Great Depression. Did it threaten to rip apart the country when it all ended? Well, so I think it ultimately did come close to ripping apart the country, but I think even maybe more powerfully ripped apart generationally a psyche.

So I don't tell this story in the book because I didn't know if it was appropriate, but I'll tell it to you. My grandfather was 11 years old. He's no longer alive in 1929. His brother was a messenger boy. And he was down there in October of 929. He used to tell this story

and he was helping his brother. And he watched somebody jump out of a window. And he lived until he was 91 years old. and he never bought a share of stock in his entire life. Boughts and bonds, never stock. And he would always say, Andrew, this whole stock market thing, not for us. Too risky. And so when I say shattering a nation, I mean, I think it did, to some degree, come close to shattering the psyche of a nation.

Did it come close to a civil war? No. Yeah. But clearly the idea of unemployment being 25% in America, that there were a shanty, towns, otherwise known as Hoovervilles, literally in Central Park, there's a couple blocks from here, and then, you know, worse in so many other places, I think for a generation of people, it felt like a shattered nation. Yeah.

You don't really go beyond the 1930s in the book, but it does feel like it took a very long time to rebuild, I guess, trust in the stock market. We didn't really see retail, like dive in a lot until, I guess, the 1960s, something like that. Yeah. I think that's right. I think that goes a little bit to the sort of generational divide. Look, the other piece of this is the book doesn't go into, you know, World War II and all the things that happened after that. But that's actually, I think, coming out of World War II is what ultimately led to sort of the boom again to the extent we had one in the U.S.

And obviously, the market's boom. And the reason why people, I think, started to get back in the market was because the market kept going up. And people started to look at the market like they always do. And when they think that the train is leaving the station and they're not. on the train, they think, I got to get on the train. Totally back to something you said before. It's interesting that these CEOs don't really speak their mind when the whole thing in January was like, finally, free speech.

We can talk again. We can say all the things that we've been hiding. It's kind of messed up, isn't it? Look, you think that there should be real free speech taking place and that people could raise their hand. The liberal attitude towards speech. But I think right now, the view is what's the tradeoff? I think there are people who look at certain things happening in Washington and say, I don't like what's happening.

If I raise my hand now, if I raise my hand today, what is the upside for raising my hand and what is the downside for raising my hand? I think they look and say there's very little upside actually because the chance of real change in this moment right now is unlikely. Maybe when we get to an election or midterms or other things, I don't know. And the chance of it on the downside is high. I mean, I think that between what we've seen the administration do the law firms to universities, the whole Paramount CBS story, taking stakes in intel and other things. I mean, I think there's real implications if you're a business leader today about how you approach your job. Every business leader is almost have to become a politician. Yeah.

All right. This is a very journalistic, classic, cliche question. I feel kind of bad, but you're another journalist. So, you know, don't judge me. If you could, I guess, take away one lesson from the 1929 crash and really emphasize it to politicians, policymakers, regulators, business people, whoever, what would it be? Every financial crisis is a function of one thing. Is leverage in the system too much leverage. You actually can have speculators and all the bad actors you want doing all the bad things you can imagine on stage.

but it's the leverage that tips it over. And as a result, you need to have guardrails to prevent that. Because the human condition is to want more, right? That's what the investor class. I hate to say it. The idea of self-regulation is very, very difficult. People do not regulate themselves. They just don't.

And so we just need to be super careful, especially when there are all these kind of new products being developed and other things. We don't know where the leverage is. is. That to me would be the single biggest thing. And my fear is we're living in a moment right now, actually, where some of those guardrails are almost purposely being taken away. Well, we have four years until the 100-year anniversary of the 1929 crash. Andrew Osorkin, so thrilled to finally have you on the podcast. The book is a great opportunity. It's really great.

I really appreciate being here. It's really cool that you did this. Everyone should be very impressed and everyone should check it out. It's great history. And I hope it becomes a TV show. Thank you. I hope I can come back here in 2009. Please. For sure. And then 23rd. Yeah. All right. That was fantastic. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Tracy, that was a lot of fun. I love bubble history. We used to do tons of more episodes on bubbles. They're always really fun. Well, you know the Florida land bubble gets mentioned in here. We did a bunch of episodes on that. And this is really cool. I love all the pop culture. element, the Winston Churchill, the Groucho Marx.

It's just a really, it's an incredibly rich story. It's an incredibly rich piece of history. Yeah, and it is funny. You can't avoid thinking about the parallels. You really can't. When am I getting my Japanese exotic rabbit bubble episode? Wait, is there any time? Was that a bubble?

I didn't know about that. Apparently. And sheep. I want to do New England sheep too. I want to do all the animal bubbles. Let's do it. Let's do them all. There's the bat, the guano bubble.

We've never done an episode on that. But the one other thing, too, is, I think like, you know, 2007, 2008, the great financial crisis, that was like a debt bubble, right? There were a bunch of assets that were expected to pay back at a dollar on the dollar. And they like paid back at 90 cents or whatever. And then people panicked and there was a bank. There was still a lot of credit tied to it. There was a lot of credit.

There was definitely the leverage. The debt was being used as collateral for. The debt was being used as a collateral. But it was, you know, right now we don't, it just feels like it's a stock story. It's a things everyone wants access to the right tail of whatever. And everyone wants the big score. etc. And that's what sort of 1929 reminds me of this idea like different than a sort of like housing bubble, just this idea like everyone wants those right tail outcomes, including Winston Churchill

and Groucho Marx. Well, you know the chart that the Dumer has always tweets, the margin debt chart, right? And, you know, I have doubts about that because the margin debt chart goes up when stocks go up basically. But it is at record highs. So anyway, people should definitely check out this book. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at The Stallwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armand, Dashel Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kail Brooks. For more Oddlots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Oddlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chat

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