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the minds of people had been so scarred the memories parents told their children 1929 became a symbol in people's minds I mean if you said 1929 it was like saying 1776 or 1492. I mean everybody knew exactly what you were talking about in 1929 my dad who was 26 years of age then was employed as a security salesman by a a local small bank and uh he sold stocks and bonds but he mostly sold stocks and when stocks fall 48 percent and they were selling them to people a few months ago you really don't feel like going out and facing those same people so I think my dad probably all I like to do is they say now shelter in place which means stay at home and there really wasn't that much at our house uh we just had a small yard it was winter time anyway my dad wouldn't have been puttering around the yard anyway and everybody wasn't you know television wasn't there and he and my mother got along very well so under those conditions I was born about nine months later so I didn't notice at the time that the market was closed but they because stock market had actually recovered over 20 percent during that nine and a half month period or thereabouts people did not think in the fall of 1930 they did not think they were in the great a Great Depression they thought it was a recession very much like that occurred at least a dozen times although not always when stock markets were important but then we'd have many recessions in the in the United States over the time and this did not look like it was something dramatically out of the ordinary and for a while actually for about 10 days after my birth the stock market actually managed to go up call up one or two percent there and uh in those 10 days but that's the last day uh well from that point the uh stock market went from a level of 240 then 241 which was a noticeable decline because uh if somebody had given me a thousand dollars on the day I was born and I thought stuck with my thousand dollars would have become one hundred and seventy dollars in less than two years and that is something that none of us hearing ever experienced that uh we may have had it with one stock gave me but but in terms of uh having a broad range of America marked down 83 percent in two years and marked down 89 percent of the peak it was in September 1929.
ah it was extraordinary and in that intervening period less than one year after I was born is slightly less than one year my dad went to the bank where he worked and had his account and of course the bank had a sign on it closed and uh so he had no job he had two kids at that point and his father had a grocery store but Charlie and I both worked for my grandfather Charlie worked there in 1940 I worked there in 1941 so we didn't know each other but but my grandfather said to my father that don't worry about your groceries already says I'll just let your bill run that was my grandpa's not exactly he was he cared about his family but he wasn't going to go crazy and uh one of the things as I look back on that period And I don't think the economist generally like to give it that much of a point of importance but if we'd had the FDIC 10 years earlier we the FDIC started on January 1st 1934 it was part of the sweeping legislation that took place when Roosevelt came in but if we'd had the FDIC we would have had a much much different experience I believe in the in the Great Depression people probably went on smooth smooth hall here and they I mean they there's all kinds of things and the margin requirements in 29 and all of those things entered into creating a recession but if you have over 4 000 banks failed that's 4 000 local experiences are people safe and safe and safe and put their money away and then someday they reach for it and it's gone and that happens you know in all 48 states and it happens to your neighbors and it happens to your relatives it has to have an effect on the psyche it's incredible so it's one very very very good thing it came out of the version of my view as the FDIC and it would have been a somewhat different world I'm sure yep the bank failures hadn't just rolled across this country and the people that thought that they were Sabers found out that they had nothing when they went there and there was a sign that said closed so the Great Depression went on and it lasted a very long time but it lasted a lot longer in the minds of people than it did actually in its effects World War II came along and on sort of an involuntary manner we adopted keynesianism we started running fiscal deficits of course that we're absolutely huge and took our debt up to a percentage of GDP which we've never reached had never reached before I never ever since so we had an enormous economic recovery but the minds of people the South guard the memories parents told their children 1929 became simple in people's minds I mean if you said 1929 it was like saying 1776 or 1492 I mean everybody knew exactly what you were talking about and it affected stock prices in a rather remarkable way it was January 4th of 1951 that the kid who was born on August 30th in 1930 had finished College before the stock market got back to where it was at that earlier time so take the years from 1920 1930 or 1929 relieved the 19.
51. or take the year from my birth 20 years and bear in mind that you know the country was only 140 years old windows started that that's 20 years out of a this amazing 231 year lifetime of our country that was flat out you know a time of no economic growth and no Feeling by people in terms about who else the country the about what American economy was worth but all these corporations that were doing far far better than they were on and all but it took all of that time to restore in the market a price level it was equal to what it was one I was born 20 years earlier so if you think about the fact that we're enduring a few months and we'll endure some many more months and we don't know how it comes out and people in the 30s didn't know how it was going to come out but they endured and persevered prospered and then the American Miracle continued but it's interesting in that I remembered that at the start of 1954 the stock market was the DOW was only at about 280 and I remember 1954 because it was the best year I ever had in the stock market uh the Dow went from essentially to 280 your thereabouts at the start of the year to a little over 400 at the end of the year and when it went to 400 as soon as it went across 381 that famous figure from 1929 when it went to 400 this will be hard for some of you to believe but everybody wondered is this 1929 all over again and that seems a little far-fetched because it was a different country in 1954 but that was the common question and it actually achieved such a level of worry about whether we were about to jump off another Cliff just because the 381 of 1929 have been succeeded exceeded that Senator Fulbright Bill Fulbright of Arkansas who became very famous later in terms of the Foreign Relations Committee but he had the Senate Banking Committee and he called a special her special investigation he really was questioning whether we had built another house of cards again and his committee in March of 1955 with the Dow at 405.
assembled 20 of the best Minds in the United States to testify as to whether we were going crazy again because the market was at 400 the dollars at 400 and we'd gotten in this incredible trouble before but that was the mindset of the country this is incredible we didn't really believe America was what it was and my boss the reason Rivers was that I was working in New York for one of the 20 people that was called down to testify and I remember because Ben Graham was one of the three smartest people alive men in my life and when he testified the Dow at 404 he had one line in there right toward the start and his written testimony and he said the stock market is high looks High it is high but it's not as high as it looks but he said it is high and since that time we felt the American Tailwind at full force and a market today that has produced 100 dollars for every dollar all you did it was had to believe an American just buy a cross-section of America you didn't you didn't have to read The Wall Street Journal you didn't have to look up the price of your stock you didn't have to pay a lot of money and fees to anybody you just had to believe that the miracle was intact but you'd had this testing period between 1929 and certainly 1954 as indicated by what happened when it got back up to 380.
you had this testing period and uh people really they'd lost faith to some degree they just didn't see the potential of what America could do and we found that nothing could stop America when you get right down to it and it's been true all along it may have been interrupted one of the scariest of scenarios when you had a war with one group of states finding another group of states and it may have been tested again in the Great Depression and it may be tested now to some degree but in the end the answers never been against America and that in my view was as true today as and it wasn't 1789 and even was true at the bring the Civil War steps of the depression
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