by John Brooks
There is historical precedent (though not from de la Vega’s day) for the single large Stock Exchange transaction that turns the market, or is intended to turn it. At half past one on October 24, 1929—the dreadful day that has gone down in financial history as Black Thursday—Richard Whitney, then acting president of the Exchange and probably the best-known figure on its floor, strode conspicuously (some say “jauntily”) up to the post where U.S. Steel was traded, and bid 205, the price of the last sale, for ten thousand shares. But there are two crucial differences between the 1929 trade and the 1962 one. In the first place, Whitney’s stagy bid was a calculated effort to create an effect, while Cranley’s, delivered without fanfare, was apparently just a move to get a bargain for the Dreyfus Fund. Secondly, only an evanescent rally followed the 1929 deal—the next week’s losses made Black Thursday look no worse than gray—while a genuinely solid recovery followed the one in 1962. The moral may be that psychological gestures on the Exchange are most effective when they are neither intended nor really needed. At all events, a general rally began almost immediately. Having broken through the 100 barrier, Telephone leaped wildly upward: at 12:18, it was traded at 101¼; at 12:41, at 103½; and at 1:05, at 106¼. General Motors went from 45½ at 11:46 to 50 at 1:38. Standard Oil of New Jersey went from 46¾ at 11:46 to 51 at 1:28. U.S. Steel went from 49½ at 11:40 to 52⅜ at 1:28. I.B.M. was, in its way, the most dramatic case of the lot. All morning, its stock had been kept out of trading by an overwhelming preponderance of selling orders, and the guesses as to its ultimate opening price varied from a loss of ten points to a loss of twenty or thirty; now such an avalanche of buying orders appeared that when it was at last technically possible for the stock to be traded, just before two o’clock, it opened up four points, on a huge block of thirty thousand shares. At 12:28, less than half an hour after the big Telephone trade, the Dow-Jones news service was sure enough of what was happening to state flatly, “The market has turned strong.”
And so it had, but the speed of the turnaround produced more irony. When the broad tape has occasion to transmit an extended news item, such as a report on a prominent man’s speech, it customarily breaks the item up into a series of short sections, which can then be transmitted at intervals, leaving time in the interstices for such spot news as the latest prices from the Exchange floor. This was what it did during the early afternoon of May 29th with a speech delivered to the National Press Club by H. Ladd Plumley, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, which began to be reported on the Dow-Jones tape at 12:25, or at almost exactly the same time that the same news source declared the market to have turned strong. As the speech came out in sections on the broad tape, it created an odd effect indeed. The tape started off by saying that Plumley had called for “a thoughtful appreciation of the present lack of business confidence.” At this point, there was an interruption for a few minutes’ worth of stock prices, all of them sharply higher. Then the tape returned to Plumley, who was now warming to his task and blaming the stock-market plunge on “the coincidental impact of two confidence-upsetting factors—a dimming of profit expectations and President Kennedy’s quashing of the steel price increase.” Then came a longer interruption, chock-full of reassuring facts and figures. At its conclusion, Plumley was back on the tape, hammering away at his theme, which had now taken on overtones of “I told you so.” “We have had an awesome demonstration that the ‘right business climate’ cannot be brushed off as a Madison Avenue cliché but is a reality much to be desired,” the broad tape quoted him as saying. So it went through the early afternoon; it must have been a heady time for the Dow-Jones subscribers, who could alternately nibble at the caviar of higher stock prices and sip the champagne of Plumley’s jabs at the Kennedy administration.
IT was during the last hour and a half on Tuesday that the pace of trading on the Exchange reached its most frantic. The official count of trades recorded after three o’clock (that is, in the last half hour) came to just over seven million shares—in normal times as they were reckoned in 1962, an unheard-of figure even for a whole day’s trading. When the closing bell sounded, a cheer again arose from the floor—this one a good deal more full-throated than Monday’s, because the day’s gain of 27.03 points in the Dow-Jones average meant that almost three-quarters of Monday’s losses had been recouped; of the $20,800,000,000 that had summarily vanished on Monday, $13,500,000,000 had now reappeared. (These heart-warming figures weren’t available until hours after the close, but experienced securities men are vouchsafed visceral intuitions of surprising statistical accuracy; some of them claim that at Tuesday’s closing they could feel in their guts a Dow-Jones gain of over twenty-five points, and there is no reason to dispute their claim.) The mood was cheerful, then, but the hours were long. Because of the greater trading volume, tickers ticked and lights burned even farther into the night than they had on Monday; the Exchange tape did not print the day’s last transaction until 8:15—four and three-quarters hours after it had actually occurred. Nor did the next day, Memorial Day, turn out to be a day off for the securities business. Wise old Wall Streeters had expressed the opinion that the holiday, falling by happy chance in the middle of the crisis and thus providing an opportunity for the cooling of overheated emotions, may have been the biggest factor in preventing the crisis from becoming a disaster. What it indubitably did provide was a chance for the Stock Exchange and its member organizations—all of whom had been directed to remain at their battle stations over the holiday—to begin picking up the pieces.
The insidious effects of a late tape had to be explained to thousands of naïve customers who thought they had bought U.S. Steel at, say, 50, only to find later that they had paid 54 or 55. The complaints of thousands of other customers could not be so easily answered. One brokerage house discovered that two orders it had sent to the floor at precisely the same time—one to buy Telephone at the prevailing price, the other to sell the same quantity at the prevailing price—had resulted in the seller’s getting 102 per share for his stock and the buyer’s paying 108 for his. Badly shaken by a situation that seemed to cast doubt on the validity of the law of supply and demand, the brokerage house made inquiries and found that the buying order had got temporarily lost in the crush and had failed to reach Post 15 until the price had gone up six points. Since the mistake had not been the customer’s, the brokerage firm paid him the difference. As for the Stock Exchange itself, it had a variety of problems to deal with on Wednesday, among them that of keeping happy a team of television men from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who, having forgotten all about the United States custom of observing a holiday on May 30th, had flown down from Montreal to take pictures of Wednesday’s action on the Exchange. At the same time, Exchange officials were necessarily pondering the problem of Monday’s and Tuesday’s scandalously laggard ticker, which everyone agreed had been at the very heart of—if not, indeed, the cause of—the most nearly catastrophic technical snarl in history. The Exchange’s defense of itself, later set down in detail, amounts, in effect, to a complaint that the crisis came two years too soon. “It would be inaccurate to suggest that all investors were served with normal speed and efficiency by existing facilities,” the Exchange conceded, with characteristic conservatism, and went on to say that a ticker with almost twice the speed of the present one was expected to be ready for installation in 1964. (In fact, the new ticker and various other automation devices, duly installed more or less on time, proved to be so heroically effective that the fantastic trading pace of April, 1968 was handled with only negligible tape delays.) The fact that the 1962 hurricane hit while the shelter was under construction was characterized by the Exchange as “perhaps ironic.”
There was still plenty of cause for concern on Thursday morning. After a period of panic selling, the market has a habit of bouncing back dramatically and then resuming its slide. More than one broker recalled that on October 30, 1929—immediately after the all-time-record two-day decline, and immediately before the
start of the truly disastrous slide that was to continue for years and precipitate the great depression—the Dow-Jones gain had been 28.40, representing a rebound ominously comparable to this one. In other words, the market still suffers at times from what de la Vega clinically called “antiperistasis”—the tendency to reverse itself, then reverse the reversal, and so on. A follower of the antiperistasis system of security analysis might have concluded that the market was now poised for another dive. As things turned out, of course, it wasn’t. Thursday was a day of steady, orderly rises in stock prices. Minutes after the ten-o’clock opening, the broad tape spread the news that brokers everywhere were being deluged with buying orders, many of them coming from South America, Asia, and the Western European countries that are normally active in the New York stock market. “Orders still pouring in from all directions,” the broad tape announced exultantly just before eleven. Lost money was magically reappearing, and more was on the way. Shortly before two o’clock, the Dow-Jones tape, having proceeded from euphoria to insouciance, took time off from market reports to include a note on plans for a boxing match between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. Markets in Europe, reacting to New York on the upturn just as they had on the downturn, had risen sharply. New York copper futures had recovered over eighty per cent of their Monday and Tuesday-morning losses, so Chile’s treasury was mostly bailed out. As for the Dow-Jones industrial average at closing, it figured out to 613.36, meaning that the week’s losses had been wiped out in toto, with a little bit to spare. The crisis was over. In Morgan’s terms, the market had fluctuated; in de la Vega’s terms, antiperistasis had been demonstrated.
ALL that summer, and even into the following year, security analysts and other experts cranked out their explanations of what had happened, and so great were the logic, solemnity, and detail of these diagnoses that they lost only a little of their force through the fact that hardly any of the authors had had the slightest idea what was going to happen before the crisis occurred. Probably the most scholarly and detailed report on who did the selling that caused the crisis was furnished by the New York Stock Exchange itself, which began sending elaborate questionnaires to its individual and corporate members immediately after the commotion was over. The Exchange calculated that during the three days of the crisis rural areas of the country were more active in the market than they customarily are; that women investors had sold two and a half times as much stock as men investors; that foreign investors were far more active than usual, accounting for 5.5 per cent of the total volume, and, on balance, were substantial sellers; and, most striking of all, that what the Exchange calls “public individuals”—individual investors, as opposed to institutional ones, which is to say people who would be described anywhere but on Wall Street as private individuals—played an astonishingly large role in the whole affair, accounting for an unprecedented 56.8 per cent of the total volume. Breaking down the public individuals into income categories, the Exchange calculated that those with family incomes of over twenty-five thousand dollars a year were the heaviest and most insistent sellers, while those with incomes under ten thousand dollars, after selling on Monday and early on Tuesday, bought so many shares on Thursday that they actually became net buyers over the three-day period. Furthermore, according to the Exchange’s calculations, about a million shares—or 3.5 per cent of the total volume during the three days—were sold as a result of margin calls. In sum, if there was a villain, it appeared to have been the relatively rich investor not connected with the securities business—and, more often than might have been expected, the female, rural, or foreign one, in many cases playing the market partly on borrowed money.
The role of the hero was filled, surprisingly, by the most frightening of untested forces in the market—the mutual funds. The Exchange’s statistics showed that on Monday, when prices were plunging, the funds bought 530,000 more shares than they sold, while on Thursday, when investors in general were stumbling over each other trying to buy stock, the funds, on balance, sold 375,000 shares; in other words, far from increasing the market’s fluctuation, the funds actually served as a stabilizing force. Exactly how this unexpectedly benign effect came about remains a matter of debate. Since no one has been heard to suggest that the funds acted out of sheer public-spiritedness during the crisis, it seems safe to assume that they were buying on Monday because their managers had spotted bargains, and were selling on Thursday because of chances to cash in on profits. As for the problem of redemptions, there were, as had been feared, a large number of mutual-fund shareholders who demanded millions of dollars of their money in cash when the market crashed, but apparently the mutual funds had so much cash on hand that in most cases they could pay off their shareholders without selling substantial amounts of stock. Taken as a group, the funds proved to be so rich and so conservatively managed that they not only could weather the storm but, by happy inadvertence, could do something to decrease its violence. Whether the same conditions would exist in some future storm was and is another matter.
In the last analysis, the cause of the 1962 crisis remains unfathomable; what is known is that it occurred, and that something like it could occur again. As one of Wall Street’s aged, ever-anonymous seers put it recently, “I was concerned, but at no time did I think it would be another 1929. I never said the Dow-Jones would go down to four hundred. I said five hundred. The point is that now, in contrast to 1929, the government, Republican or Democratic, realizes that it must be attentive to the needs of business. There will never be apple-sellers on Wall Street again. As to whether what happened that May can happen again—of course it can. I think that people may be more careful for a year or two, and then we may see another speculative buildup followed by another crash, and so on until God makes people less greedy.”
Or, as de la Vega said, “It is foolish to think that you can withdraw from the Exchange after you have tasted the sweetness of the honey.”
2
The Fate of the Edsel
RISE AND FLOWERING
IN the calendar of American economic life, 1955 was the Year of the Automobile. That year, American automobile makers sold over seven million passenger cars, or over a million more than they had sold in any previous year. That year, General Motors easily sold the public $325 million worth of new common stock, and the stock market as a whole, led by the motors, gyrated upward so frantically that Congress investigated it. And that year, too, the Ford Motor Company decided to produce a new automobile in what was quaintly called the medium-price range—roughly, from $2,400 to $4,000—and went ahead and designed it more or less in conformity with the fashion of the day, which was for cars that were long, wide, low, lavishly decorated with chrome, liberally supplied with gadgets, and equipped with engines of a power just barely insufficient to send them into orbit. Two years later, in September, 1957, the Ford Company put its new car, the Edsel, on the market, to the accompaniment of more fanfare than had attended the arrival of any other new car since the same company’s Model A, brought out thirty years earlier. The total amount spent on the Edsel before the first specimen went on sale was announced as a quarter of a billion dollars; its launching—as Business Week declared and nobody cared to deny—was more costly than that of any other consumer product in history. As a starter toward getting its investment back, Ford counted on selling at least 200,000 Edsels the first year.
There may be an aborigine somewhere in a remote rain forest who hasn’t yet heard that things failed to turn out that way. To be precise, two years two months and fifteen days later Ford had sold only 109,466 Edsels, and, beyond a doubt, many hundreds, if not several thousands, of those were bought by Ford executives, dealers, salesmen, advertising men, assembly-line workers, and others who had a personal interest in seeing the car succeed. The 109,466 amounted to considerably less than one per cent of the passenger cars sold in the United States during that period, and on November 19, 1959, having lost, according to some outside estimates, around $350 million on the Edsel, the Ford Company perma
nently discontinued its production.
How could this have happened? How could a company so mightily endowed with money, experience, and, presumably, brains have been guilty of such a monumental mistake? Even before the Edsel was dropped, some of the more articulate members of the car-minded public had come forward with an answer—an answer so simple and so seemingly reasonable that, though it was not the only one advanced, it became widely accepted as the truth. The Edsel, these people argued, was designed, named, advertised, and promoted with a slavish adherence to the results of public-opinion polls and of their younger cousin, motivational research, and they concluded that when the public is wooed in an excessively calculated manner, it tends to turn away in favor of some gruffer but more spontaneously attentive suitor. Several years ago, in the face of an understandable reticence on the part of the Ford Motor Company, which enjoys documenting its boners no more than anyone else, I set out to learn what I could about the Edsel debacle, and my investigations have led me to believe that what we have here is less than the whole truth.
For, although the Edsel was supposed to be advertised, and otherwise promoted, strictly on the basis of preferences expressed in polls, some old-fashioned snake-oil-selling methods, intuitive rather than scientific, crept in. Although it was supposed to have been named in much the same way, science was curtly discarded at the last minute and the Edsel was named for the father of the company’s president, like a nineteenth-century brand of cough drops or saddle soap. As for the design, it was arrived at without even a pretense of consulting the polls, and by the method that has been standard for years in the designing of automobiles—that of simply pooling the hunches of sundry company committees. The common explanation of the Edsel’s downfall, then, under scrutiny, turns out to be largely a myth, in the colloquial sense of that term. But the facts of the case may live to become a myth of a symbolic sort—a modern American antisuccess story.