Word: stockely
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...just such evidence of economic strength that two weeks ago led Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to push up interest rates to new highs and announce new measures to curb the inflationary growth of the nation's money sup ply. But the money stock actually expanded by $2.8 billion in the first week after the "Volcker Package" was announced, and the Fed immediately began tightening credit and forcing up interest rates still further. This drove the Dow Jones index of industrial stocks down an extra 24 points last week, renewing memories of the Great Crash that occurred 50 years...
Without hearing a word of what is being said or shouted, any experienced trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange can listen to the hum of voices around him and tell what is happening. An up market has a different pitch from a down market. But old Wall Street hands vividly remember an exception to that rule. One day 50 years ago next week, recalls David Granger, 76, a senior partner at Granger & Co., a Wall Street brokerage house, "there was a hush over the floor that I've never heard since. It was funereal." Indeed...
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...
...with ups as well as downs, for several weeks. "We tend to blame the market," says Kidder Peabody Chairman Albert Gordon, 78, who then worked in corporate finance for Goldman, Sachs. "But the market was just a symptom. We were in a bad economic situation whether or not the stock market crashed...
...days went on and the panic spread, Western Union hired fleets of taxis to help deliver margin calls to speculators. It was common to see people rushing from their banks to their brokers with stock certificates and bonds they had just taken from safe deposit boxes. Insurance companies were besieged by people wanting to cash in or borrow on their policies...