Manias, panics, and crashes

The best known and most highly regarded book on market crisis, Manias, Panics, and Crashes is entertaining, exhaustive, and thoroughly engaging. Since its introduction in 1978, it has charted a new landscape in the volatile world of financial markets. Charles Kindleberger's brilliant, panoramic history revealed how financial crises follow a nature-like rhythm: they peak and purge, swell and storm.

Now in a newly revised and expanded third edition, Manias, Panics, and Crashes probes the most recent "natural disasters" of the markets - from Black Monday to the Japanese boom and bust, from the Sterling crisis and Peso devaluation to the potential "bubble" of today's technology stocks.

Along with scores of casualties and criminals, a revealing common thread emerges from this rich history of manias, panics, and crashes: market crises are associated with greed and avarice. Just as money evolved from coins to include bank notes, bills of exchange, bank deposits, and checks, greed likewise took on many different forms. Lightning will strike an economic environment in strife, and Kindleberger explores what happens to the markets when conflicting interests arise.

Manias, Panics, and Crashes can be regarded as a warning or a proposition, reminding readers, in many ways, that what goes around comes around. Like all true classics, Kindleberger's book remains timely - for better or for worse.