Manias, Panics, and Crashes
A History of Financial Crises

If you're looking for a colorful, narrative history of financial bubbles, this book is not for you. Kindleberger is bone dry, and his goal is mainly to analyze common features of bubble cycles. Towards that end, he tends to pick a feature, then run through ten or twenty examples of how that feature......more

This was the second time reading this book. Honestly, the second time around I found this book to be rather boring. The theme of the book is as timely as ever, and I highly recommend reading something like it if you are interested in manias, panics, crashes (and financial fraud). As with the first t......more

Was a bit disappointing, most of the book is about events that happened more than 100 years ago, short coverage of the last 80 years. The book reads like 10 different people wrote parts of it and didn't know what others were writing. Some events are covered multiple times, the south sea bubble has 16 entr......more

Kindleberger's "Manias, Panics and Crashes" is a must read for anyone active in the markets. If you want to learn how to identify downcycles early, and to understand their progression and eventual end, look no further than Kindleberger's work. While other worthy tomes, such as "History of Financial D......more

This is a classic book in the financial world, but I was somewhat disappointed with it. Kindleberger uses Hyman Minsky's "anatomy" of financial crises to discuss commonalities between a number of different financial panics from different countries at different times in history. I had been hoping for......more