The Go-Go Years by John Brooks

Author:John Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497679108
Publisher: Open Road Media

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Why? Where were the counsels of restraint, not to say common sense, in both Washington and on Wall Street? The answer seems to lie in the conclusion that in America, with its deeply imprinted business ethic, no inherent stabilizer, moral or practical, is sufficiently strong in and of itself to support the turning away of new business when competitors are taking it on. As a people, we would rather face chaos making potsfull of short-term money than maintain long-term order and sanity by profiting less. A former high S.E.C. official, talking to me in 1969 about the situation the year before, defended the S.E.C.’s relative passivity by describing its rightful function as that of being “an arbiter between powerful industry groups pulling in different directions.” An arbiter, rather than a conscience? And indeed, did Wall Street that year deserve an S.E.C. that would act vigorously to save it from itself? After all, the Securities Acts, not by chance, were based on self-regulation on the part of Wall Street. Where was self-regulation in 1968?

Essentially, it was in the hands of the leaders of Wall Street’s key institution, the New York Stock Exchange, whose president since the previous September had been Robert W. Haack. Haack was no Keith Funston. He lacked his predecessor’s fire and flair, and also, more happily, Funston’s sometimes fanatical protectiveness of Wall Street and all its self-indulgent ways. Born in 1917 and raised in Milwaukee in modest circumstances, Haack had worked his way steadily and surely to his present eminence: a B.A. from little Hope College, in Holland, Michigan (once famous as the home of Holland rusk); an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, where he had earned part of his keep by waiting on tables; three wartime years in the Navy; a slow rise, during the nineteen forties, from research assistant to partner in a Milwaukee securities firm; a move to the East, where he joined the bureaucracy of the National Association of Securities Dealers, of which he became a governor in 1961 and full-time paid president in 1964; and then, in 1967, election to what was still the key position in Wall Street. He was the third choice, after Edwin Etherington and Donald Cook had privately made clear that they wanted no part of the job. Funston was a hard act to follow, and Haack, moreover, came to the Stock Exchange with a reputation as a technician, a plodder, a bureaucrat, what the Russians call an apparatchik. Still, he soon showed himself to be something more. He did not hesitate to shake up the entrenched Exchange staff to make it conform to his style rather than to Funston’s; he instituted badly needed long-range planning; he gradually ended Funston’s emphasis on high-pressure promotion of the concept of stock investment for every man; he generally ran a taut ship. Significantly, he kept the home he had bought in Potomac, Maryland, when he had been negotiating constantly with the S.E.C. on behalf of the over-the-counter market, and he commuted from it to Wall Street as often as circumstances allowed.

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