From Bust to Bust

Andrew Ross Sorkin tells NATALIE KORACH his new book on 1929 works as a parable for today—down to the characters

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Ona snowy day in January, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink joined Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC's Squawk Box for an interview in Davos, Switzerland, where corporate and political leaders gather for the annual World Economic Forum. While the segment mainly revolved around the BlackRock CEO's plea for Donald Trump's SEC to make it harder for activist shareholders to take on corporations via proxy vote, Sorkin couldn't resist asking for Fink's take on the booming cryptocurrency ecosystem.

“Are you planning on issuing either a meme coin, ETFs, or anything like that, now that the animal spirits seem to be very much alive?” he asked.

“I think the Sorkin coin,” Fink replied. Two hours later, Sorkin was watching the brand-new cryptocurrency, minted by some enterprising meme coiner, soar by millions of dollars. “It was wild,” he recalls.

At the time, Sorkin was finishing his latest book, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History—And How It Shattered a Nation, an extensive account of how Wall Street and the US government dragged the country into the Great Depression.

Several months later, over a late-summer coffee, Sorkin and I are discussing the history of the economic collapse and the book itself, in which the parallels to today exist almost down to the person, Fink included—sort of (more on that below). I ask whether the popular 1920s-era stock-pooling practice among Wall Street insiders—where powerful investors combined their resources and artificially ran up the stock price of a given company—bore any similarity to modern-day meme stocks, as online communities drive stock purchases, leading to rapid price oscillation. “Completely,” Sorkin replies, adding that it’s happening in both meme stock culture and the world of crypto. So what’s the contemporary analog to the old stock pool? “I think Reddit,” Sorkin says.