Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

floor brokers, after completing a trade, would

THE STOCK MARKET

posed to have made to a naïve acquaintance who had ventured to ask the great man what the market was going to do. “It will fluctuate,” replied Morgan dryly. And it has many other distinctive characteristics. Apart from the economic advantages and disadvantages of stock exchanges—the advantage that they provide a free flow of capital to finance industrial expansion, for instance, and the disadvantage that they provide an all too convenient way for the unlucky, the imprudent, and the gullible to lose their money—their development has created a whole pattern of social behavior, complete with customs, language, and predictable responses to given events. What is truly extraordinary is the speed with which this pattern emerged full blown following the establishment, in 1611, o

‘Why should I want to have a lot of copies of this and that lying around? Nothing but clutter in the office, a temptation to prying eyes, and a waste of good paper.’”

(By the middle of the seventeenth century, the medieval use of the noun “copy” in the robust sense of “plenty” or “abundance” had faded out, leaving behind nothing but its adjective form, “copious.”)

“There is no possible protection from technology except by technology,” he wrote. “When you create a new environment with one phase of technology, you have to create an anti-environment with the next.” But authors are seldom good at technology, and probably do not flourish in anti-environments.

The crisis ran its course in three days, but, needless to say, the post-mortems took longer. One of de la Vega’s observations about the Amsterdam traders was that they were “very clever in inventing reasons” for a sudden rise or fall in stock prices, and the Wall Street pundits certainly needed all the cleverness they could muster to explain why, in the middle of an excellent business year, the market had suddenly taken its second-worst nose dive ever up to that moment.

say nothing about the car as a whole but to reveal its individual charms a little at a time—a sort of automotive strip tease

Edsel” was a disastrously unfortunate combination of syllables. What were its free associations? Pretzel, diesel, hard sell.

Capitalize on imagery weakness of competition,”