Old Wall Street’s Preserved Fish

What early New York financier’s name described pickled herring, finnan haddie and other storable seafood?

That was the question posed by WQXR’s Know-It-All New Yorker contest this week. Answer: Preserved Fish.

Born in 1766, Preserved (a Quaker name, properly pronounced “Pres-ser-ved”) left the farm to become cabin boy on a whaling ship. By age 21 he was a ship’s captain. By his 40’s, whale oil had made him rich enough to move to New York, where he and a cousin started a shipping company. Preserved helped found the New York Exchange Board (forerunner to The New York Stock Exchange) and in 1829 became president of the Tradesman's Bank of New York. 

More on Preserved Fish here.

If a Four-Day Week is Good Enough for a Trust Company . . .

 The five-day work week is a modern construct. Back in 1871, when The New York Stock Exchange started continuous trading, the floor was open Monday through Saturday. Six years later the Saturday trading session was cut to mornings only, but Saturday morning trading persisted until 1952. 

If the six-day work week could evolve to five days, why not four? A New Zealand trust company has tried the idea – work four days, get paid for five – and the experiment went so well that the change has become permanent.

Now the consequences of Covid 19 have proponents of the four-day week hoping for a large-scale breakthrough. 

Could it happen? Plenty of employers seem to embrace the idea, at least until they learn they're not supposed to pay 20 percent less for 20 percent less work time. Four days work, five days pay!

When Wall Street Was Sitting Pretty

These days Wall Street creates fear and anxiety, as illustrated in The New Yorker cover mentioned here.

Fifty Septembers ago the magazine offered a much prettier picture. Wall Street in the vicinity of The New York Stock Exchange was a symphony of color, superimposed on financial headlines.

At the time the Dow Jones Industrial Average was flirting with 1,000, a lofty height unimaginable back in the Depression. Members of the Greatest Generation who started investing after WWII were doing very well indeed.

The New York Stock Exchange was still a big deal in 1965. To build new business for its member firms the Exchange ran a series of ads. Here's one.

The ad's advice is prudent. Investors should buy stocks only with money they won't need in the foreseeable future, define their goals, study the companies that interest them. And, of course, consult a registered representative at a member firm. 

Today we know The New Yorker cover painted too rosy a picture. The mid-1960's marked the crest of the great postwar investment boom. The Dow wouldn't flirt with 1,000 again until the '80s.

If that 1965 New Yorker cover marked the end of an investment era, might this year's cat-and-mouse cover also herald a turning point? Since the Dot.Com bust of 1999, stock prices have soared, plunged, soared and, lately, plunged again. Plenty of sound and fury, more than enough fear and anxiety, but little or no net progress.

Back in 1999, Warren Buffett forecast that investors might have to wait 17 years for the beginning of another great bull market. That is, until 2016. So cheer up! Maybe we have only one more year of fear and anxiety to go.