Tham khảo tài liệu 'the four pillars of investing: lessons for building a winning portfolio_8', tài chính - ngân hàng, tài chính doanh nghiệp phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 160 The Four Pillars of Investing bubble and subsequent collapse would likely have been much less violent. A similar reaction occurred in the United States in the wake of the 1929 crash that should give pause to many involved in the most recent speculative excess. At the center of this titanic story was a brilliant attorney of Sicilian origin Ferdinand Pecora. Just before the market bottom in 1932 with embittered investors everywhere demanding investigation of Wall Street s chicanery the Senate authorized a Banking and Currency Committee. It promptly hired Pecora then a New York City assistant district attorney as its counsel. In the following year he skillfully guided the committee and via it the public through an investigation of the sordid mass of manipulation and fraud that characterized the era. The high and mighty of Wall Street were politely but devastatingly interrogated by Pecora right up to . Jack Morgan scion of the House of Morgan and a formidable figure in his own right. But the real drama centered around New York Stock Exchange President Richard Whitney. Tall cool and aristocratic he symbolized the Old Guard at the stock exchange who sought to keep it the private preserve of the member firms free of government regulation. In the drama of the October 1929 crash Whitney was the closest thing Wall Street had to a popular hero. At the height of the bloodshed on Black Thursday October 25 1929 he strode to the . Steel post and made the most famous single trade in the history of finance a purchase of 10 000 shares of . Steel at 205 even though at that point it was trading well below that price. This single-handedly stopped the panic. But Dick Whitney was a flawed hero. His arrogance in front of the committee alienated both the legislators and the public. He was also a lousy investor with a weakness for cockamamie schemes and an inability to cut his losses. He wound up deeply in debt and began borrowing heavily first from his brother a Morgan partner
