I received many posts from people about their Black Monday experience, and they are worth sharing. On the occasion you mention, at our firm we each were assigned to poll money managers we trusted; high among them was Reich & Tang.[i] We kept in touch regularly and then shared our compilation of the “brain trust’s” analyses of the unfolding crash. I recall Joe Reich saying something to the effect that Reich and Tang was buying because at these prices, the companies were either huge buys or the U.S.A. was collapsing. In the former case, they would make a great deal of money; in the latter, losing more would not be the biggest problem the firm faced. One of my assigned contacts was Clark Clifford, a self-described child of the Depression, but then the Chairman of First American Bankshares, a conglomeration of banks. He, in turn, was calling his banks to determine if there was a Depression-era run on them. I was happy to tell Joe Reich that Clark Clifford could find none. (A note on Clifford: a tall, handsome, elegant, but seemingly austere, man; former White House counsel under Truman; Secretary of Defense under Johnson; an extremely powerful Democrat feared by many, he had begun life as the son of a Missouri-based railroad worker and a schoolteacher who was a national story-telling champion.)
Absolutely timeless. Thanks for sharing, Gene.