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.

Some People Have Big Bezzles

 Today’s Axios Markets pointed me to a Felix Salmon column where I learned a new word. Here’s the gist:

When markets turn, more investors tend to want to take their money out. That's when victims of fraud find out the money has disappeared. The Bernie Madoff fraud is a prime example — it couldn't survive the downturn of 2008, since the higher Madoff marked his clients' positions, the more likely they were to want to cash out.

Until the point of discovery, the money is gone, but the victim feels no loss. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in 1955, named this "net increase in psychic wealth" the bezzle, and explained that it invariably increases in bull markets, only to shrink when "money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye.”

As John Mills wrote in 1867: "Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works."

No, Salmon’s column does not mention NFTs.