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of foreign countries. The men on these lists were notified of the coming
crash, and sold all but so-called gilt-edged stocks, General Motors,
Dupont, etc. The prices on these stocks also sank to record lows, but
they came up soon afterwards. How the big bankers operated in
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1929 is revealed by a Newsweek story on May 30, 1936, when a
Roosevelt appointee, Ralph W. Morrison, resigned from the Federal
Reserve Board:
"The consensus of opinion is that the Federal Reserve Board has lost an
able man. He sold his Texas utilities stock to Insull for ten million dollars,
and in 1929 called a meeting and ordered his banks to close out all
security loans by September 1. As a result, they rode through the
depression with flying colors."
Predictably enough, all of the big bankers rode through the depression
"with flying colors." The people who suffered were the workers and
farmers who had invested their money in get-rich stocks, after the
President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, and the Secretary of
the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, had persuaded them to do it.
There had been some warnings of the approaching crash in England,
which American newspapers never saw. The London Statist on May 25,
1929 said:
"The banking authorities in the United States apparently want a
business panic to curb speculation."
The London Economist on May 11, 1929, said: