Lords of Finance: 1929, the Great Depression, and the Bankers Who Broke the World (49 page)

Whereas Gulbenkian, nicknamed “Mr. Five Percent,” dealt in Middle East oil rights and Zaharoff in arms, Kreuger manufactured nothing grander or more threatening than plain little matches. Given the scale of his empire, however—he then controlled three-quarters of the world’s
match manufacturing—he could borrow money in New York on finer terms than most European governments. Exploiting this financial muscle, he floated bonds on Wall Street and used the proceeds to shore up the finances of the less creditworthy governments across the globe, exacting in return match monopolies in the countries to which he lent. He had concluded such deals with Poland, Peru, Greece, Ecuador, Hungary, Estonia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Latvia. He had even provided $75 million to the French government during the stabilization of the franc in return for a quasi monopoly in France. Now he offered the German government $145 million in return for a ban on all imports of cheap Russian matches.

As interest rates rose in the United States and New York functioned as a magnet, drawing money from all corners of the globe, every country in Europe, except France, struggled to prevent its gold from escaping across the Atlantic. Interest rates, as Keynes put it, “even in countries thousands of miles
⁵³⁴
away from Wall Street,” ratcheted upward, propelled by the scramble for gold. In February 1929, the Bank of England raised its rates a full percentage point to 5.5 percent, despite unemployment above 1.5 million. In March, Italy and the Netherlands followed suit. Germany was already deep in recession, but after the raid on its reserves during the Young Plan negotiations, had also been forced to hike its rates to 7.5 percent. Austria and Hungary more than matched the Reichsbank, taking their rates to over 8 percent. In July, Belgium joined the column.

With the steady erosion in commodity prices, the effect of the rate hikes was to raise the real cost of money in many places to over 10 percent, bringing with it the first signs of worldwide economic slowdown. This had begun in 1928 in the big commodity producers: Australia, Canada, and Argentina. By early 1929, Germany and Central Europe were also in recession.

The U.S. stock market meanwhile refused to pay attention to either the rising cost of money around the world or the first signs of slowdown abroad. In June, it broke out on the upside. As reports of outstanding corporate earnings poured in, the Dow kept going up. In June it rose 34 points and another 16 in July.

The character of the market
⁵³⁵
had by now become almost completely speculative. As trading turned feverish, action increasingly concentrated in an ever narrower roster of companies and was no longer led by those that were making sustained large profits—the General Motors corporations of the world. Instead, it was frantically pursuing glamour stocks—Montgomery Ward, General Electric, and the most dazzling of them all, Radio Corporation of America. Thus, while the market averages continued to race up, reaching their peak in September, most individual stocks had hit their highs in late 1928 or at best in early 1929. Indeed, on September 3, 1929
⁵³⁶
, the day the Dow topped out, only 19 of the 826 stocks on the New York Exchange attained all-time highs. Almost a third had fallen at least 20 percent from their highest points.

It was during these months that most of the large stock traders sold their positions. Claims by speculators about what they did in 1929 and when they did it need to be taken with some grains of salt. People rarely tell the complete truth either about their amorous exploits or their stock portfolios, the latter being especially true for professional investors whose reputations hinge on appearing to be prescient about the market.

In February, Owen Young
⁵³⁷
, alarmed by the feverish level of stock prices and the Fed’s war of words, sold his entire portfolio of $2.2 million, some of it held on margin. David Sarnoff, Young’s vice president at RCA and a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris conference, got out in June. John J. Raskob, the man who sincerely wanted everyone to be rich and was touting stocks as a long-term investment in the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
had apparently liquidated most of his portfolio before his article appeared. Joe Kennedy
⁵³⁸
, catching the last rally, sold in July 1929. Bernard Baruch claims
⁵³⁹
, in his autobiography, to have had an epiphany on the Scottish moors in September of 1929, rushed home and dumped everything by the end of the month. Even Thomas Lamont
⁵⁴⁰
, the inveterate optimist, sold substantial amounts of his portfolio during the spring and summer.

Even the greatest cheerleader of them all, that most determined of bulls, Billy Durant, got rid of his positions. In April 1929, he had some friends
⁵⁴¹
arrange for him to meet secretly with the president. He slipped out
of New York, careful not to inform even his secretary of his destination, took a train down to Washington, hopped anonymously into a taxi, and arrived at the White House at 9:30 in the evening, when he was ushered into the president’s study. He told Hoover that unless the Fed eased up its assault against the stock market, there would be a financial catastrophe. It is not clear whether Durant understood that he was wasting his breath, that Hoover was fully behind the Fed’s campaign. He does seem to have realized soon after the meeting that his warnings had gone nowhere. On April 17, he set sail for Europe aboard the
Aquitania
, and a few weeks later, he and most of his crowd began liquidating their positions.

But behind the scenes, the Board of the Federal Reserve was finally ready to concede that its attempts at “direct action” were a failure. On August 8, after the market had closed, the New York Fed announced that it was raising its discount rate from 5 percent to 6 percent. The next day the Dow plunged 15 points in frantic trading, the largest daily decline in the index’s history. The market suddenly realized, however, that speculators had been comfortably making large profits while paying much higher rates in the brokers’ loan market. Within a day, all the losses were recouped.

Over the next three weeks, the Dow went up another 30 points. Among investors there reigned, as one commentator described it, the sort of “panic which keeps people
⁵⁴²
at roulette tables, the insidious propaganda against quitting a winner, the fear of being taunted by those who held on.” It was symptomatic of the market’s reach when on August 14, the New York Stock Exchange firm of Saint-Phalle and Co. announced that it had opened direct ship-to-shore service aboard the transatlantic liner
Ile de France,
to be followed a few days later by M. J. Meehan and Co, opening a similar service on the
Berengaria
and the
Leviathan.

Even Europe was drawn into the frenzy. “Scores of thousands
⁵⁴³
of American shares are bought everyday in London alone and Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Amsterdam are pouring money into New York as fast as the cable can carry it,” complained Viscount Rothermere in one of his newspapers, the
Sunday Pictorial
. “Wall Street has become a colossal suction pump, which is draining the world of capital and the suction is fast producing a
vacuum over here. That is why bank rates are rising throughout Europe. That is the reason of the steady withdrawal of gold from the Bank of England. That is the explanation of the frequent visits which the governor of the bank, Mr. Montagu Norman, pays to New York and Washington.”

In July, Norman made his second trip of the year to the United States. He spent most of his weeks of holiday with his old friend Mrs. Markoe at Bar Harbor in Maine but did go to see Harrison in New York. He came back even more pessimistic than after his February trip. He was now convinced that some sort of stock market crash in the United States was inevitable. No one could be sure what might set it off or how bad it would be. The longer the bubble continued, the more unavoidable would be the breakdown. And though the Fed was finally beginning to act, it had left things very late and still remained a bitterly divided institution.

Throughout the summer of 1929, Britain’s reserves came under siege. By the end of July, the Bank of England had already lost $100 million of its $800 million of gold and in August and September, it lost a further $45 million, mainly into the United States. There were also signs that the Banque de France had resumed converting its pounds. Since 1927, the flow of money into France had continued unabated, although now most of it was in the form of gold rather than sterling. By the middle of 1929, the Banque de France had accumulated $1.2 billion in gold and another $1.2 billion in foreign exchange, giving it an extraordinary hold on the world financial situation.

During the two years since Norman and Moreau had first fallen out, the Banque de France, recognizing that it had the power to destabilize the world currency situation, had actually been very restrained in handling its sterling. But the Young Plan negotiations put a new strain on Anglo-French relations. Having made some concessions to Germany on reparations, the former Allies fell out on how to divide the burden.

In June 1929, Britain went to the polls. After four years of high unemployment under Conservative rule, the Tories were voted out of office and a minority Labor government took power. Churchill was replaced at the Exchequer by Philip Snowden, a long and bitter opponent of France and
French policy on reparations. At a conference at The Hague in August 1929 to wrap up some of the details of the Young Plan, he entered into a particularly heated exchange with his French counterpart, Henri Chéron, in the course of which he described the French finance minister’s arguments as “ridiculous and grotesque.” The translation into French, “
ridicule et grotesque
” has a much harsher connotation, implying bad faith and utter stupidity. As the economic historian Charles Kindleberger put it, the English expression could be used in the House of Commons, the French expression would not be allowed in the Chambre des Députés. Chéron, a “fat excitable man
⁵⁴⁴
” whose enormous girth had made him the constant victim of jokes and who was, consequently, unusually sensitive, took offense at Snowden’s remarks, and sent his seconds to demand an apology—the French were only just weaning themselves off the practice of dueling.

Though he was eventually induced to return to the negotiating table, relations between Britain and France were severely strained. At one meeting during the same negotiations, Pierre Quesnay of the Banque de France is said to have threatened to convert France’s holdings of sterling into gold unless the British conceded. Though the evidence is murky, this was not mere saber rattling and Britain’s gold continued to come under attack.

On August 19,
Time
magazine ran a cover story on Norman, the “Palladin of Gold,” as it called him. The article described how within Europe “invisibly the battle of gold
⁵⁴⁵
was on.” In late August, as Britain’s reserves hit
⁵⁴⁶
a postwar low, Norman warned his fellow directors that unless something were to change, large parts of Europe, including Britain, would be driven off gold and that they should begin to prepare for the impending havoc. But first another cataclysm was to blindside the world economy.

^fn1
Livermore’s own career belied his own statement. Sensing that the boom in 1907 was going to turn into a spectacular bust, he made his first millions by shorting the market just before the panic of that year. He reputedly made another fortune the same way in 1929—he would make and lose several such fortunes in his lifetime. In 1940, he shot himself in the cloakroom of the Sherry Netherlands Hotel in New York City. He had $5 million in his bank account.

^fn2
She went on a hunger strike in jail, became a national folk heroine when she escaped the prison hospital by climbing down a rope made of bedsheets, was recaptured, and at her trial revealed the names of politicians she had bribed. She committed suicide in prison in 1935.

If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?

—W
ILL
R
OGERS

THERE IS AN
old stock trader’s adage: “Nobody rings a bell at the top of the market.” As Wall Street returned to work after Labor Day on Tuesday, September 3, few people thought that this might be the end of the bull market. The weekend had been unusually hot, and the journey home from the beach was marred by terrible traffic jams and long delays at train stations. Congestion on the New Jersey highways was so bad that thousands of people had parked their cars and finished the journey home to Manhattan by subway.

As bankers assessed the market after the summer, they were assisted by a fresh new voice to add to the blithe new-era optimism of the
Wall Street Journal
and the dark mutterings about “portents” and “misgivings” from Alexander Dana Noyes, financial columnist of the
New York Times.
That week, the premiere issue of
BusinessWeek
hit the newsstands. It sought to bring the successful
Time
magazine formula of snappy and vivid writing to the corporate world. From the very first issue, the editors expressed their skepticism about the bull market. “For five years at least
⁵⁴⁷
,” they wrote,
“American business has been in the grips of an apocalyptic, holy-rolling exaltation over the unparalleled prosperity of the ‘new era’ upon which we, or it, or somebody has entered.” It had carried the country “into a cloud-land of fantasy.” “As the fall begins,” they warned, “there is a tenseness in Wall Street . . . a general feeling that something is going to happen during the present season. . . . Stock prices are generally out of line with safe earnings expectations, and the market is now almost wholly ‘psychological.’”