Word: raskob
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Opened in the teeth of the Depression as a mighty symbol of rebirth, the 102-floor building got off to a wobbly start financially. Built by General Motors executive John Raskob, the building reigned for 42 years as the world's tallest. Its Art Deco crown, intended as a mooring mast for blimps, served as a handy perch in King Kong. A few skyscrapers have since soared higher, but none has surpassed its limestone majesty...
...cash. About one-third of the nation's more than 3 million stockholders were playing the market on margin, and people at dinner parties kept telling stories about barbers or messenger boys who had kept their ears open, bought on margin and become millionaires. John J. Raskob, who had been a director of General Motors and was now the Democratic Party chairman, published an article titled "Everybody Ought to Be Rich." The jazz age would never end. What almost nobody seemed to notice was that while the leading stocks kept climbing, many others did not. Celanese, for example, had dropped...
That is, one could buy $10,000 worth of stock with just $1,000. Many thousands did, lured into the market by boosters like John J. Raskob, the stenographer turned entrepreneur who built the Empire State Building. "Everyone ought to be rich," he wrote in an exuberant Ladies' Home Journal article; anyone who could invest $15 a month, he declared, could eventually reap a profit of $80,000. A Harvard behavioral psychologist named John Watson even found therapeutic value in speculation. "Sex has become so free and abundant," he theorized, "that it no longer provides the thrill it once...
...United's president. United was eventually merged into General Motors and Durant was ousted by the Du Pont family, already large G.M. stockholders. New President Pierre S. Du Pont asked Sloan to stay as operations vice president; he had undoubtedly been influenced by Du Pont Director John J. Raskob. "There," said Raskob about Sloan, "is a man who should be President of the United States. He never will, because he is not colorful enough...
Ever since Wall Street's Blue Monday crash, economic sages ranging from mutual fund managers to Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon have been recalling the late John J. Raskob's half-forgotten rule of thumb (TIME. June 1) that even the stock of a promising company should be priced at no more than 15 times the company's per share earnings. If that ratio held, the warning ran, the Dow-Jones industrial average would have to sink to 540. Last week it fell even farther than that; in five days of almost unbroken decline...