VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
must have been a hundred brokers around the Money Post, each hoping to borrow the
money that his firm urgently needed. Without money they must sell what stocks they
were carrying on margin sell at any price they could get in a market where buyers were
as scarce as money and just then there was not a dollar in sight.
My friend's partner was as bearish as I was. The firm therefore did not have to borrow,
but my friend, the broker I told you about, fresh from seeing the haggard faces around
the Money Post, came to me. He knew I was heavily short of the entire market.
He said, "My God, Larry! I don't know what's going to happen. I never saw anything
like it. It can't go on. Something has got to give. It looks to me as if everybody is busted
right now. You can't sell stocks, and there is absolutely no money in there."
"How do you mean?" I asked.
But what he answered was, "Did you ever hear of the classroom experiment of the
mouse in a glass-bell when they begin to pump the air out of the bell? You can see the
poor mouse breathe faster and faster, its sides heaving like overworked bellows, trying
to get enough oxygen out of the decreasing supply in the bell. You watch it suffocate till
its eyes almost pop out of their sockets, gasping, dying. Well, that is what I think of
when I see the crowd at the Money Post! No money anywhere, and you can't liquidate
stocks because there is nobody to buy them. The whole Street is broke at this very
moment, if you ask me!"
It made me think. I had seen a smash coming, but not, I admit, the worst panic in our
history. It might not be profitable to anybody if it went much further.
Finally it became plain that there was no use in waiting at the Post for money. There
wasn't going to be any. Then hell broke loose.
The president of the Stock Exchange, Mr. R. H. Thomas, so I heard later in the day,
knowing that every house in the Street was headed for disaster, went out in search of
succour. He called on James Stillman, president of the National City Bank, the richest
bank in the United States. Its boast was that it never loaned money at a higher rate than 6
per cent.
Stillman heard what the president of the New York Stock Exchange had to say. Then he
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