Word: marketization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Look at how fixated we've become with the daily ups and downs of the Dow--how our hearts race when the market is up and how we sag when the market does. Or look at how we've turned mutual-fund managers like Peter Lynch into celebrities. Most of all, look at the extraordinary extent to which we now rely on stocks to fund our retirement, send our kids to college and allow us to lead the kind of comfortable lives we view as middle class. We believe in the market today with something approaching religious faith...
Which, it turns out, is a pretty fair description of how Merrill always viewed the market. Its ability to create wealth broadly was to him an undeniable proposition. And while this is now a more or less universal truth, it was not always so. During the first part of this century, after all, the Street was largely a rigged game. Insiders manipulated the market from behind the curtains, behavior that, while unseemly, was legal then. Small investors were scorned--or fleeced. Yet Merrill was untouched by the cynicism that pervaded Wall Street. Like so many American visionaries, he was marked...
...Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression change Merrill's views? Quite the contrary. The Crash proved that people should have listened to him instead of to those charlatans who encouraged investors to borrow so heavily and to speculate so wildly. And if Americans had soured on the market by the end of the 1930s--and how could they not as the Dow Jones average lost 60% of its value and people came to see how rotten the game had been--Merrill eventually came to the conclusion that someone would have to rekindle the country's faith in the market...
...retrospect, Merrill Lynch was really Charlie Merrill's bully pulpit, the platform from which he could preach the virtues of the stock market and show the country that the small investor could get a fair shake on Wall Street. "Demystification had been the key to [my father's] great success," James Merrill later wrote in his memoir. "No more mumbo-jumbo from Harvard men in paneled rooms; let the stock market's workings henceforth be intelligible even to the small investor." To that end, the firm published an endless stream of reports, magazines, pamphlets--11 million pieces in 1955 alone...
...basic message he preached so many years ago-- that people should invest for the long haul; that they should have a clear understanding of the companies they are buying; that despite the hair-raising ups and downs, stocks have historically outperformed every other form of investment. Today the stock market no longer belongs to insiders. It belongs to all of us. We all now partake in its gains, just as we share in its losses--and who among us would argue that it should be any other way? Good Time Charlie Merrill's lonely voice has become America's common...