Word: raskob
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...