This chart looks a lot like the 2008 Stock Market Crash Chart.
The West Mifflin School District in the 1960s did not teach
students about investing. In the General
Business classes, they spent maybe 15 minutes on how to read stock market quotes
in the newspaper. They gave no other information to students. The General Business classes were for
children who were not college bound. The children that were, did not get any
training in financial markets. My studies concerning financial markets started
in the newspapers and in books on my own.
I started hanging around brokerage firms in 1972. This was a
time when brokerage, banking, insurance, and real-estate had to be separate
companies by law (Known as the Glass-Stiegel Act ). Brokerage firms where owned by a group of
people and sometimes one person. They
were regional companies. The owners were concerned about helping the customer
save or make money for the future as well as making a living for themselves.
These owners took pride in their work and was held in high regard
by the public. The no. 1 PBS TV show at
that time was Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser. This show gave anyone who
cared to learn anything about investments exposure to the industry. Here is where I got the idea to teach the public
this skill through TV, Radio, and newspaper columns.
The Floor of the New York Stock Exchange
Louis Rukeyser,
Television Host, Dies at 73
BY JAMES GRANT
Published: May 3, 2006
James Grant was a panelist on "Wall Street
Week" for 10 years, beginning in 1988.
Louis
Rukeyser, the exquisitely tailored and pun-loving television host who helped
millions of Americans believe that they could get rich in the stock market, or
at least begin to understand it, died yesterday at his home in Greenwich, Conn.
He was 73.
He
died of multiple myeloma, said his brother Bud Rukeyser.
When
"Wall Street Week" was broadcast for the first time on Nov. 20, 1970,
probably nobody, not even the always self-assured Mr. Rukeyser, dreamed that
the show would run for 32 years while attracting the biggest audience on public
television and making its host a celebrity in the improbable field of
light-hearted, free-market-oriented financial commentary. The Dow Jones
Industrial Average was then languishing, and the population of American mutual
funds numbered a scant 323.
And
though the Dow continued to languish (not until 1982 did it push above 1,000, a
mark it had first set in 1966), "Wall Street Week" prospered. "I
invented the job of economic commentary on television," Mr. Rukeyser said
in 1980. He was already well along in inventing the medium of investment
broadcasting.
"Fridays
at 8:30 find me — amply fed, digestive organs ruminating contentedly to the
rhythmic sloshing of martini juice — sitting in my Louis Quinze armchair
awaiting another installment of 'Wall Street Week,' " wrote Russell Baker
in The New York Times at
the beginning of the show's second decade. "By 8:33 my mind is reeling so
wildly with gyrations of the Dow Jones average and the pinwheeling of money
funds, Treasury bills and gold markets that I often require a calming infusion
of brandy."
The
show attained its biggest audience, some six million viewers, in the
mid-1980's.
Mr.
Rukeyser, though he prodded the financial gurus who appeared on the program to
forecast the stock market (the rosier the outlook, the better he liked it, as a
rule), he usually kept his own predictive counsel.
But
when, in 1980, he uncharacteristically ventured part way out on a limb —
"I think we have entered the decade of the common stock," he said —
he proved only partly correct. In fact, the market had embarked on a nearly
two-decade up-cycle, and Mr. Rukeyser was started on his own professional bull
market.
"Wall
Street Week" had as its point of origin not the beating heart of American
finance in Lower Manhattan but the leafy Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills, Md.
The show was the brainchild of Anne Truax Darlington, a producer with Maryland
Public Broadcasting, and the original corps of panelists was recruited from the
Baltimore financial community, not previously noted for its telegenic
possibilities.
Mr.
Rukeyser's supporting cast members (later augmented by experts from outside
Baltimore) became little celebrities in their own right. "I get recognized
in bus lines," one long-serving panelist, Monte Gordon, remarked in 1990.
"I get recognized when I'm eating in restaurants. There's a lot of psychic
satisfaction to being on the show."
There
was money at stake, too. The value of an appearance on "Wall Street
Week" to each week's "special guest"— mutual-fund portfolio
manager, bank trust officer, economist — climbed as the bull stock market went
higher and higher.
"So
how badly do people want to get on?" The Times asked a New
York publicist, Len Kessler, in 1990. "It's spelled k-i-l-l," said
Mr. Kessler.
Louis
Richard Rukeyser was second of four sons of the financial journalist Merryle S.
Rukeyser, who wrote a syndicated column in the Hearst newspapers.
Louis
Rukeyser graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton
University in 1954. He took a reporting job at The Baltimore Sun
and, within five years, was made London bureau chief, an unusually swift rise
through the newsroom ranks. He joined ABC News in 1965 as a correspondent and
commentator. Not until 1973 did he judge it safe to quit his day job for a
still-unproven "Wall Street Week."
It
was a decision that he never regretted. After 20 years on the air, Mr. Rukeyser
was earning $300,000 a year from the show and $1 million or more in annual
speaking income, each speech bearing the same title, "What's Ahead for the
Economy" — the echo of the title of a book he wrote for Simon &
Schuster in 1983.
He
produced, in addition, a thrice-weekly newspaper column and a book on investing
("How to Make Money in Wall Street," Doubleday, 1974). Later he added
a pair of newsletters, Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street and Louis Rukeyser's Mutual
Funds. He flew first class, loved to gamble, slept in the best and gaudiest
suites in the finest hotels and dressed every inch the sybarite he was. In
1991, The Fashion Foundation of America pronounced him the "best-dressed
man in finance."
The
host of "Wall Street Week" ("with Louis Rukeyser," he never
failed to add to the show's title) and self-described champion of the
"little guy" could be openly contemptuous of professional investors,
a sentiment many of them warmly reciprocated. Mr. Rukeyser reserved his most
withering scorn for the "gloomy Guses" and "Wrong-Way
Corrigans" who warned of financial troubles that, during the prosperous
1990's, never transpired.
An
eternal bull on the stock market, the more bullish, and less tolerant of
dissenting bears he became, the higher the averages climbed. On the program of
Nov. 5, 1999, Mr. Rukeyser announced the firing of the veteran panelist Gail
Dudak for her 156 consecutive weeks of bearishly errant forecasting. Ms. Dudak
heard the news from her neighbors the next morning. The stock market peaked
four months later.
Though
"Wall Street Week" never fell from the top of the heap of TV
financial programs (a pile that owed much of its impressive height to Mr.
Rukeyser's success), viewership slipped as stock prices fell and as competition
from other financial media increased. In March 2002, Maryland Public TV
announced that the snowy-haired Mr. Rukeyser would be eased out to make room
for a youth movement led by the staff of Fortune Magazine.
Mr.
Rukeyser would have none of it. "I want you to rise up out of your
chairs," he summoned his viewers from the set of "Wall Street Week'
the next Friday evening, "not to shout, 'I'm mad as hell and not going to
take it anymore!' but," he added, to "write or e-mail your local PBS
station saying you heard Louis Rukeyser is still going to have a program and
that you'd like to see it."
Mr.
Rukeyser was fired. But he quickly re-established the show at CNBC. He took
pride in his new success and glee in the spectacle of Maryland Public
Broadcasting suffering a forced retrenchment as his sponsors decamped from
public television with him. (The Fortune version of "Wall Street
Week" was canceled in 2005.)
Failing
health forced Mr. Rukeyser off the air in 2003. He was presented with the
Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Emmy for Business and Financial Reporting in
2004.
The
Hijacking of the Industry
I
noticed that in the 1980s, the small community brokerage firms were bought out
by large national and multinational corporations. Then the media and full brokerage
firms started turning customers away from bonds. They did not encourage
customers to buy individual stocks.
Instead
they channeled everyone into mutual funds. The Glass-Stiegel Act was no longer in effect,
due to an act of congress. By the turn of the century, the large corporations
had control of most people's 401K, IRAs, and Pension Funds. They had control of
your corporate political power.
The
large corporations had many reasons for taking control.
1.
Mutual funds gave the brokerage firms more commissions than individual stocks
and bonds.
2.
The funds controlled the voting rights to the stock held in the many portfolios
in the funds. They voted in the Directors, they put proposals before the board,
and they had a say in who got hired and who got fired in top management.
Stock
and bond investing has gone back to a skill that is passed down from one
generation in a family to the next. If your family did not do it or was
indifferent to it then chances are, so are you!
This
is why workers wages have been stagnant for 20 to 30 years and top management
can name their own salaries. Here is why your jobs are moving over seas and you
the worker cannot do anything about it.
