Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles. By William Quinn and John D. Turner. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 3296. $24.95, hardcover.

Abstract

The end of the bicycle mania and the dot-com bubbles simply solidified the hold of leading companies in the technology that sparked the bubble, but the railway mania ended with an over-extended network that plagues the efficiency of the British rail system to this day, in the authors’ opinion, at least. (An American reviewer has a different perspective, it has to be said!) Government-inspired bubbles, unfortunately, can have long-term, deleterious consequences, as was the case for Australia’s land boom at the end of the nineteenth century, the Wall Street crash worldwide in the 1930s, the lost decade of growth for Japan in the 1980s, and the sub-prime crisis, which they extend beyond the United States to include Ireland, Spain, and Greece. By contrast, they find that the government-initiated, and propelled, stock market bubbles in China have, at least to date, ended with only minor consequences due to effective management of the effects by an increasingly authoritarian government.