Weekend Listen: Why 2026 Is Beginning to Look Like 1929 (with Andrew Ross Sorkin)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.

**Stephanie Flanders** (0:19)
I'm Stephanie Flanders, Head of Government and Economics at Bloomberg, and this is Trumponomics, the podcast that looks at the economic world of Donald Trump, how he's already shaking up the global economy, and what on earth is going to happen next. This week, we have something a little different, a conversation with, arguably, the world's most famous business journalist, about something big that happened nearly a hundred years ago, but could very well be happening again.
Thank you very much, Andrew Ross Sorkin, for joining us.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (0:54)
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**Stephanie Flanders** (0:56)
It's quite unusual to have you, not least because you're a full-time journalist for not just one, but two of our leading competitors, The New York Times and CNBC, but we're big enough to take it. But it's also quite rare to have someone who's primarily a business journalist. We most often have economic policy makers or economists or political reporters for that matter. But you do, in your position, sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Washington and media, and that is where we're very interested in. We're there a lot.
I guess most important for this conversation, you have written two cracking books about two moments in economic history that I'm very interested in, and I think many of our listeners are interested in. The Global Financial Crisis, Too Big to Fail, and now most recently, 1929
Obviously, 1929 and what came after, people are drawing more and more parallels with now. We're recording this on Monday, the 8th of June, after what is I think now being referred to a healthy pullback of a Friday in stocks, but obviously lots of discussion around how vulnerable this stock market might be. But I wanted to talk about the book and 1929 first, because I have to admit when I heard you were writing this book, I did wonder, am I going to want to read another book on that topic? It's a fantastic moment in history, if you're interested in economic history, but there have been a lot of books. I think, and I love the JK. Galbraith, The Great Crash, I think that's just like I've read that.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (2:27)
Fabulous.

**Stephanie Flanders** (2:28)
I can't remember how many times. So why did you think there was room for another book, if I can ask you the obvious question?

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (2:34)
I, like you, had read a lot of the other books as well. And for whatever reason, most of the books that have been written about this period, to me, were written by economists. They were written in a particular kind of style. And the kind of book that I always love to read, more than any, is the book that takes you inside the room with the characters, that doesn't treat things as economic systems or economic cycles, so much as really examines the people who make decisions that I would argue drive the economic systems and economic cycles, and put you in a place where you can understand their motivations, their incentives, you can understand their morality, whether they were aligned or unaligned with reality. And so to me, I thought that was the opening. Could you write a character-driven story that really puts you there, and so that the reader, the public, can really understand what was going on, not just in this economic story, but in the personal story of these people.
And the truth is that the challenge was trying to figure out, could I find enough granular detail from diaries, from memos, from notes, from transcripts, so that you really could feel like you were inside of their head.

**Stephanie Flanders** (4:02)
And famously, that is what you did. You were kind of the first draft of that bit of history for the global financial crisis or that particular period where the bailout tarp was being pulled together in 2008 You sort of think of the comparisons between those two books. I was talking to someone actually this weekend who happened to be quite a senior policymaker during the global financial crisis.
And he had read 1929 and I said, what do you think of it? He was really impressed by the degree of detail, as you say, the description of the characters. He said the real lesson was that it was no one's fault. And he didn't think that was true of the global financial crisis. But what was the big thing that you took away from it? Once you got to know all these characters.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (4:42)
Oh, goodness.
Look, I'm a believer typically, and I probably believe this about 2008 as well. Not that it's nobody's fault, but in fact that when you have a crisis of this kind of magnitude, it's everybody's fault. What is interesting, by the way, to me, about 1929, oddly enough, when you get to this issue of fault or blame, if you read the diaries of people who lost a fortune in 1929, lost their home, had the margin call, most of the diaries suggest that they blame themselves. They actually were not pointing fingers. They were not blaming others. They were saying, I shouldn't have done this. I had, the phrase FOMO didn't exist back then, but they all had FOMO, this fear of missing out.