New York - The Novel

his people not to despise these small investors. “Don’t forget,” he’d tell them, “they are the future of America.” So when he got inside he asked the senior clerk who the fellow was.
    “An Italian man, sir. Had an account with us for years. Remarkable really. He works in Little Italy as a waiter, but he has quite a respectable account.”
    “What’s he good for?”
    “About seventy thousand dollars. Unfortunately he’s just sold all his stock. We gave him the funds today.”
    “Sold everything?”
    “I tried to persuade him not to, but he came in on Monday and said he’d decided not to tempt fate.” The clerk smiled. “Said he’d had a sign from St. Anthony.”
    “Really? Well, I think he was mistaken.” He grinned. “But I guess he didn’t know: God only talks to the Morgans.”
    “Yes, sir. Though actually, sir, while you’ve been out, the market’s been falling quite a bit.”

    The start of the great crash of 1929 is usually given as Black Thursday, October 24. This is incorrect. It began on Wednesday, the very day that the Chrysler Building became the tallest structure in the world, when stocks abruptly tumbled 4.6 percent. Strangely, few people had yet noticed the clever trick that Walter Chrysler had played. But everybody noticed Wednesday’s stock market collapse.
    On Thursday morning, William Master went into the Stock Exchange as it opened its doors. The atmosphere was tense. Glancing up at the visitors’ gallery, he saw a face he thought looked familiar. “That’s Winston Churchill, the British politician,” one of the traders remarked. “He’s chosen a hell of a day to call.”
    He certainly had. As trading began, Master was aghast. The market wasn’t just falling, it was in headlong panic. By the end of the first hour, there were cries of pain, then howls. Men with margin calls were being wiped out. A couple of times, sellers were shouting out prices and finding not a single buyer in the market. As noon approached, he reckoned the market would soon have fallen nearly ten percent. The anguished hubbub from the floor was so loud that, unable to bear it any longer, he walked outside.
    In the street, the scene was extraordinary. A crowd of men had gathered on the steps of Federal Hall. They seemed to be in shock. He saw a fellow come out of the Exchange and burst into tears. An old broker he knew passed him and remarked, with a shake of the head: “Ain’t seen anything like this since the crash of 1907.”
    But in 1907, old Pierpont Morgan had been there to save the day. Maybe his son Jack could do something? But Jack Morgan was on the other side of the Atlantic in England, for the shooting season. The courtly senior Morgan partner Thomas Lamont was in charge.
    As if on cue, at that moment, a group of men went up the steps of 23 Wall Street, the House of Morgan. He recognized at once the heads of the greatest banks. Could they stop the rot?
    It seemed they could. At one thirty that day, Richard Whitney, the president of the Stock Exchange and a broker for Morgan, walked calmly out of 23 Wall Street, went straight to the floor of the Exchange, andstarted buying. Big money, big stocks, at well above the asking price. The banks had given him $240 million to use if he needed, but he only had to use a fraction. With a great sigh of relief, the market began to calm down.
    The godlike spirit of Pierpont Morgan had descended from Olympus to rule the street once more.
    That night William attended a big meeting of brokers. Everyone agreed the panic was unnecessary. On Friday, and on Saturday morning, the market suffered no further crisis.
    He spent the rest of the weekend quietly. On Sunday, Charlie came by for lunch. “Technically,” William told them, “this sell-off has left the market in better condition than it’s been in for months.” After that, asking Charlie to keep his mother company, he went for a walk in Central Park.
    The truth was, he needed some time alone, to think.
    What had really happened? The underlying problem, he reckoned, was that for the last few years, there had been too much cash in the stock market. Funnily enough, it wasn’t that everything was booming. Farming and commodity prices had been weak, so instead of investing in those traditional staples, people had been looking for gains in stocks. Cash flowed in; brokers, banks and other finance houses mushroomed. Even in the huge American economy, there weren’t really enough productive stocks for