"[4] Galbraith received much praise for his work, including his humorous observations of human behavior during the speculative stock market bubble and subsequent crash.

The funds released by the Fed became available to invest in the stock market and "from that date, according to all the evidence, the situation got completely out of control".

It is early in 1928 that the "escape into make believe" started in earnest, when the market began to rise by large vaulting leaps rather than steady increments.

Overall, the market rose during the year from 245 to 331 which was accompanied by a phenomenal increase in trading on margin,[11] which relieved the buyer from putting up the full purchase price of the stock by using the securities as collateral for a loan.

The buyer obtained full benefit of ownership in rising stock valuation, but the loan amount remained the same.

[2] Galbraith further argues that the Great Depression was caused by a mixture of five main weaknesses: First, an imbalance in the income distribution.

Also, "The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds.

As one failed, pressure was applied to another, leading to a domino effect accelerated by increasing unemployment and lower incomes.

Galbraith says that the "economists and those who offered economic counsel in the late twenties and early thirties were almost uniquely perverse" and that "the burden of reputable economic advice was invariably on the side of measures that would make things worse.

"[18] Galbraith was of the opinion that the Great Crash had burned itself so deeply into the national consciousness that America had been spared another bubble up to the present time (1954).

;[19] however he thought the chances of another speculative orgy which characterized the 1929 crash as rather good as he felt the American people remained susceptible to the conviction that unlimited rewards were to be had and that they individually were meant to share in it.

[21] In 2008 and 2009, Jim Cramer took to waving John Kenneth Galbraith's book,[22] and praising it on his show Mad Money.