The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

largest two hundred corporations in the US were not owned by large blockholders or by other corporations, and there is reason to think that coalitions of stockholders had potential control even in many of the firms with diffuse ownership (Leech 1987).

330. Hughes (1979, p. 160).

331. Bonbright and Means (1932, p. 226). 332. Neufeld (2016).

Chapter 6: The Real Catastrophe

1. Galbraith (1955, p. 168).

2. “Time has not been kind to the school of thought that blames the Depression on the stock-market crash” (Temin 1989, p. 43).

3. Romer (1990, p. 597).

4. Whaples (1995, p. 143).

5. Keynes actually had little or no influence on American policy during the Depression,

which was in fact animated by a homegrown folk Keynesianism. I treat Keynes more carefully later in the postwar context.

6. Edwards (2018); Romer (1992). Faced with the new consensus among economic historians, Eric Rauchway has recently attempted to resuscitate the conventional view that Keynes and Roosevelt saved capitalism—now, astoundingly, because of the monetarist policies they advocated and enacted (Rauchway 2015).

7. Bernanke (1983).

8. Meltzer (2003, pp. 144–45).

9. Chandler (1958, p. 329).

10. Ahamed (2009, p. 171).

11. Toma (2013).

12. Ahamed (2009, pp. 173–74); Meltzer (2003, pp. 145–54). 13. Eichengreen (1996).

Notes to Chapter 6 599

14. Timberlake (2007, p. 339). Miller was well-acquainted with fellow Laughlin student H. Parker Willis, who was still advising Carter Glass, now head of the Senate Banking Committee. When Glass had been on the Fed Board ex officio as Treasury Secretary, Willis was the Board secretary.

15. Chandler (1958, pp. 291–331).

16. White (1990, p. 69).

17. Ahamed (2009, pp. 274–75). Contrary to popular belief, however, margin requirements

were not low during this period, and they were generally on the increase over the decade, espe- cially in the months before the crash (Smiley and Keehn 1988).

18. Hoover (1952b, p. 9).

19. Meltzer (2003, pp. 203–5).

20. Ahamed (2009, pp. 278).

21. Field (2012, p. 46).

22. White (1990).

23. Ahamed (2009, pp. 295–300).

24. Chandler (1958, pp. 454–55).

25. Romer (1993, p. 27).

26. Friedman and Schwartz (1963, pp. 279–84).

27. Miller (1935, p. 453).

28. Miller (1935, p. 454).

29. Friedman and Schwartz (1963, pp. 254–63); Meltzer (2003, pp. 235–41).

30. Bordo and Wheelock (2013, p 84); Toma (2013, pp. xii-xix).

31. Eichengreen (1996, pp. 222–23).

32. Chandler (1971, pp. 72–73).

33. Meltzer (2003, p. 243).

34. Meltzer (1976, p. 462).

35. Samuel H. Williamson, “Daily Closing Value of the Dow Jones Average, 1885 to Present,”

Measuring Worth, https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/DJA/index.php (accessed April 7, 2019).

36. Allen (1931, p. 286). “There has been a little distress selling on the Stock Exchange,” Lamont calmly explained to reporters.

37. An epithet due not to Keynes (as one might expect) but to Alan Greenspan during the dot-com crash of the late century. “Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan at the Annual Dinner and Francis Boyer Lecture of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C., December 5, 1996,” Federal Reserve Board, https://www.federalreserve.gov /boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm (accessed April 7, 2019).

38. Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (1988).

39. Ahamed (2009, pp. 349–50); White (2012, p. 68). Fisher had put his money where his mouth was. In 1925 he sold Remington Rand his patent on an early version of the rolodex and invested the proceeds in the stock market on margin. He was worth some $10 million at the time of the crash and lost everything, including his house in New Haven.

40. Fisher (1930, pp. 35 and 89).

41. McGrattan and Prescott (2004); Nicholas (2007). 42. Eichengreen and Mitchener (2004).

600 Notes to Chapter 6

43. To those who hold this view, it is a delicious irony that Winston Churchill, who always seemed to gravitate to the important historical events of the century, was present in the observa- tion gallery of the New York Stock exchange on Black Tuesday. Churchill himself lost more than $50,000 in the crash and was wiped out (Ahamed 2009, p. 300; Galbraith 1955, p. 100).

44. Ahamed (2009, p. 300); (Galbraith 1955).

45. US Senate (1931, p. 134).

46. Hoover (1952b, p. vi). Of course, it was Strong who lowered rates, not the Board. Perhaps

in a wry allusion to his travails during the Midwestern flood, Hoover sarcastically referred to the events of 1929 as a second “Mississippi bubble.”