Irving Fisher Quotes
For the immediate future, at least, the outlook (stocks) is bright.
Fisher, Irving. The Stock Market Crash—And After. The Macmillan Company, 1930.
This may have been the worst stock market advice ever sent to customers. The Great Depression would suppress the economy of more than a decade.
When the stock market crashed, the Board of Governors was entertaining the idea of putting a syndicate of banks together or back some financiers who would buy up the stock that people were trying to sell. There were those who wanted to sell but no buyers at any price. They concept of a market was being destroyed. Lamont correctly explained that the idea was not practical—it was too late for that. Lamont however had underestimated the market crash and made a feeble effort to assist President Hoover make his feeble effort to get the American economy going again.
The New York Stock Exchange had closed for the day after the assassination of President Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson called Funston to express his appreciation:
President Hoover asked a group of prominent citizens to make recommendations to him regarding rumors of instability in the stock market. 10 days later was Black Tuesday where the stock market crashed and started the great depression.
He distressed most of the other stock brokers on Wall Street by pointing out that if brokers were so smart, why would they not want to buy the stock for themselves rather than sell it to you. Therefore, he generally concluded that the best stocks are bought by the brokers and bankers for their own accounts, and the lesser quality shares are sold to the public.
The great scholars were as wrong as everyone else about the Great Depression
He was one of the very few people who warned about the market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.
Irving Fisher (February 27, 1867 – April 29, 1947) was an American economist, statistician, inventor, eugenicist and progressive social campaigner. He was one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation has been embraced by the post-Keynesian school. Joseph Schumpeter described him as "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced", an assessment later repeated by James Tobin and Milton Friedman.
