♪ ♪ ♪ (theme music playing) ♪ RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm pleased to be joined in conversation today with Andrew Ross Sorkin, who is an award-winning journalist and the author, most recently, of “1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History -and How It Shattered a Nation”" We're coming to you from New York Historical Robert H. Smith Auditorium.

Andrew, thank you very much for being here.

SORKIN: Thank you for having me.

RUBENSTEIN: So this book is about, um, what happened in 1929, the great market crash, but let's go through three parts.

Let's go through the market crash, let's go through the Great Depression, and then let's go through one of the most interesting parts of the book, the individuals, the characters that you described, and their, their weaknesses and strengths in some cases.

Let's go through the... SORKIN: Okay.

RUBENSTEIN: ...the, uh, the market crash.

Um, in let's say 19 late 1920s, if you wanted to buy stock, could anybody buy stock?

Any-anybody off the street go buy a stock?

Or would you have to be a wealthy person to buy stock in?

SORKIN: No, the, the greatest transformation of the 1920s was the idea that anybody could buy stock.

But I'd even go back farther and say the greatest transformation of the 1920s was not just the, the technological transformation of automobiles and, uh, telecommunications and radio and all of that, which by the way, led to a lot of the euphoria.

It was that it was all powered by borrowing, by debt.

But interestingly, prior to 1919, borrowing money, taking out a mortgage, forget about taking out money to go buy a company was considered a moral sin.

And what really shifted the dynamic was in 1919, a guy named John Raskob, who was running General Motors, I think of him as somebody who's almost akin to the Elon Musk of his time.

John Raskob has this idea, how are we gonna sell more cars?

Well, we're gonna loan people money so they can buy our cars.

And it was that transformation that really changed the culture.

And then folks like Sears Roebuck started loaning people money, so you could buy appliances.

And then a guy named Charlie Mitchell at a bank called National City decides, "We're gonna loan you money so that you can go buy stock."

And you, you could do it.

Ev-everybody could do it.

You could walk into a, a brokerage house and you could put down a dollar, and they would loan you $10.

And that was the real shift.

RUBENSTEIN: So loans were called margin.

SORKIN: Margin.

RUBENSTEIN: And, uh, you could borrow 90% of the purchase price.

SORKIN: Well, and also there was another thing going on, which was there really was actually a remarkable amount of inequality in, in, in America, and you had people coming from all over the country to these big cities, they're seeing the elites get, uh, you know, more and more wealthy, and they're thinking, "How am I gonna do this?"

So that, that also drove, I think, a lot of the risk-taking.

I mean, I think it also shifted even the, the idea of what the American dream was.

It really transformed itself into this idea of we gotta get a shot at the lottery ticket.

RUBENSTEIN: So when people are doing this, the small investors are doing it.

They can't borrow too much, they borrow some.

But the wealthy people are borrowing a lot of money too.

Is that right?

SORKIN: Well, the wealthy people were borrowing a-a-an enormous amount, but, you know, Groucho Marx was, was a, a young actor at that time, and he was hanging out at a brokerage house in Long Island.

He was levered 10 to 1, he didn't... He was not wealthy.

So as long as you were willing to walk in the door and effectively sign your house away, and, and by the way, most people were very willing to do that.

This was the first time anybody had ever done anything like that.

And at the same time, the market, by the way, every year is going up and up and up.

So between the beginning of 1928 and September of 1929, the stock market went up 90%.

RUBENSTEIN: But, uh, what about, uh, having insider information?

Is that illegal then?

SORKIN: Not only was it not illegal, there were literally no rules.

The wealthy were creating these things called investment pools.

Um, and they were grouping together and effectively pumping and dumping stocks.

And almost like having actors on a trading floor, you know, one person saying, "Well, I'm up for 100, I'll, I'll go up to 120."

And almost the bidding, but the bidding was organized, orchestrated in advance with a plan of when to quote-unquote, "Pull the rug."

But what was so unique about it was it was somewhat out in the open, meaning there were certain stories in the paper.

People would say, "There's an operation in this stock right now."

And so there were people who were trying to trade the manipulation, meaning they were thinking, can I get on and off the train before the rug gets pulled?

RUBENSTEIN: What did the SEC say about this?

SORKIN: There was no SEC.

I mean- RUBENSTEIN: No SEC.

SORKIN: By the way, someone asked me the other day, if I, you know, in my research, had I looked at any prospectuses from this period?

And I said, "Prospectus?

You would be lucky if there was like a leaflet about these companies."

RUBENSTEIN: There's no SEC, there's margin, you borrow 9, up to 90%.

And then, uh, you also described the investment pools were not just to buy stock and have them go up, they were investment pools to short stocks, right?

SORKIN: Yes, if you really read the diaries of some of the people who were engaged in this, they really did think that they were just on the other side of trying to outwit some other group.

They didn't see it, um, as some kind of immoral or illegal or some other activity.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so people doing this, and the stock market keeps going up.

SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: So people are seeing their neighbors get rich, they're not happy, so they jump in as well.

When did the market actually crack?

SORKIN: One of the great myths of this period is that there was like one, one day... RUBENSTEIN: But there, there wasn't one day?

SORKIN: There really wasn't.

The truth is, the stock market, it took from basically the middle of October to I think November 13th was the, was the low, which is interesting.

Uh, the market went down 50%.

But here's the surprising part.

By the end of 1929, the stock market was only down about 17%, and most people don't realize that.

How is it possible the stock market's only down 17%, and all these people were wiped out?

It was that there was so much leverage in the system they owed 10 times that.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so what about the picture we often have of people jumping outta windows?

They're broke, all of a sudden they decide they just can't tolerate anymore.

They jump outta windows.

Did that actually happen?

SORKIN: So it did happen.

Um, there's sort of a very interesting statistical sort of asterisk to the, the suicide story, um, which is, if you look at the number of suicides in 1929, the number's actually lower than 1928.

Having said that, the suicides were, um, more, more pronounced in terms of the headlines.

They invariably, you know, did relate to people who lost everything.

My grandfather, Sidney Sorkin, uh, who's no longer alive, his older brother, I think, was probably 16 or 17, uh, was a messenger boy down there during the period.

This is not in the book.

Um, and he... Uh, my grandfather would go down with him after the, the crash, doing messenger work.

And they saw somebody who jumped out of a window.

And the truth is, and this is why I think it was so generationally scarring, my grandfather lived till he was, uh, 91, and he never bought a share of stock in anything his whole life.

RUBENSTEIN: Wow.

SORKIN: Again, if you read these diaries and notes and letters, the, the impact was so sort of mentally profound for people.

RUBENSTEIN: All right, so the end of 1929.

SORKIN: Yep.

RUBENSTEIN: Based on reading your book, it didn't sound as if the world said that, "We're gonna have a Great Depression because the stock market's down 17%."

So, the Great Depression came about for what reason?

It wasn't because the stock market had gone down so much.

Was that the over-leverage?

SORKIN: So, what happened was there was this real disconnect.

Uh, this is actually, I think in terms of diagnosing the problem, because the market was doing what it was doing, and you look at those numbers, and you could see those numbers, it masked this larger issue, which was all these American families that had just lost their shirts during this period.

And so as things sort of rolled into 1930, and then of course 1931, 1932, you sort of started with this idea that just confidence had just been completely sucked out of the system.

The crash is sort of the first domino.

It's then another series of dominoes that actually happened in your town of Washington, where things go truly wrong, which is to say, you know, you have President Hoover sa... Thinking that the stock market is somehow completely disconnected from the economy, which was... Which it was probably his first mistake.

His second mistake was at one point, he wanted to raise taxes in the middle of all of this.

His third mistake was he decides that he needs to implement this Smoot-Hawley tariff program.

He was so desperate to get farmers to vote for him in 1928 to, to beat Al Smith that he had promised them that he was gonna implement tariffs to try to protect them.

And so 1930 comes around, and he thinks he needs to make good on his pledge.

Well, that ended up with trade falling by 60% in 12 months.

So it's sort of a confluence of all of these, these things.

And then you had a Federal Reserve on the back side of this that, you know, did not wanna flood the system with money.

And by the way, it was unclear how much you could, because we were still on the gold standard.

That unto itself was a debate about what you could do.

And so here we are in 1932, all of a sudden, we have 25% unemployment.

We have Hooverville's tented camps, including in Central Park, by the way, um, emerging everywhere, and 9,000 banks failing by 1933.

RUBENSTEIN: So the President of the United States, there was Calvin Coolidge at one point.

SORKIN: Pri-prior to Hoover, yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Hoover had been the Secretary of Commerce under Coolidge.

SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: But they didn't really get along, and Coolidge didn't really do anything to help Hoover, right?

SORKIN: Completely.

RUBENSTEIN: Hoover was a wonder boy.

He had saved people in Europe in terms of reconstruction and, and, and famine that was happening in Europe at one point after World War I. He was seen as a hero and a take-charge person.

How come as President he didn't really wanna do very much?

SORKIN: I think there were a couple things going on.

The, the first is he chooses Mellon to be his treasurer secretary.

Uh, and he, he and Andrew Mellon also did not have a very good relationship.

And Andrew Mellon was a true capitalist with a C, and his view of the world was, if you make money, good for you, and if you lose money, good for you.

And so as a result of that, there really was a sense that there was not gonna be anybody, uh, to be helping anybody.

And by the way, the Federal Reserve, interestingly, the entire time is desperately worried about speculation getting out of control.

They're, they're talking to each other the entire time about how can they stop the speculation, but they too were scared.

Talk about Fed independence.

They too, were scared of the politics.

They're such a new organization that show up in 1913.

People used to call it "The Experiment."

It was still called that then.

And so they were, they were scared of raising interest rates too much to try to tamp down the speculation, and that that would somehow tip over the entire economy.

RUBENSTEIN: Hoover's sworn in, he doesn't do that much.

And then as he realizes, the Great Depression is really hurting him politically and so forth, and he runs for re-election against, uh, FDR.

FDR, he doesn't take FDR seriously at all.

SORKIN: He thinks Ro... He thinks Roosevelt can't last a day in the White House.

In fact, he says it out loud.

RUBENSTEIN: Yes.

Because he thought, one, he said he's a cripple.

Two, he thought he was a dilettante.

He thought he was an aristocrat.

All those things.

So, he didn't take him that seriously.

And he misread the, the mood of the country.

So, when Hoover loses to Roosevelt, he begins to say, according to your book, "We gotta work on this problem together, Uh, Franklin."

And Franklin says, "No, thank you?"

Right?

SORKIN: Oh, it was so much worse than that.

I mean, Hoover, I think, did recognize how bad it was getting.

So, this is '32, going into '33.

I think he realizes late that the banks need to be bailed out.

Something needs to be done.

By the way, one just side point, he did not, Hoover did not lose, interestingly, to Roosevelt, because of the economy.

If you go and actually look at the polls, and it was the first time they were doing the equivalent of scientific polls that we have today, he lost because of his position on Prohibition.

In fact, people thought for the most part that the economy was getting better when the vote happened.

But nonetheless, he does appreciate the problem.

RUBENSTEIN: On the, on the Prohibition, Hoover's position was maintain Prohibition?

SORKIN: Yes, he was... Hoover was, was supporting Prohibition the whole time, and that was the most politically unpopular thing you could do.

RUBENSTEIN: Hoover is trying to say to Roosevelt, during this interim period of time, "Let's..." SORKIN: So Roosevelt says, "I'm not gonna do any of this, and I don't want to even talk to you about anything."

And Hoover is secretly sending him letters.

He's having the Secret Service bring letters to him, saying, "Look, this is what's gonna happen.

The country's gonna fall apart.

I want to do something that I can't do it myself without your endorsement."

Because otherwise, he didn't think that it would create enough confidence in the system.

Of course, Roosevelt doesn't wanna have anything to do with this because he wants to start his presidency with a clean slate.

And so he pooh-poos everything that Hoover's saying and effectively says that he's never gonna do those things.

So he lies effectively to Hoover about what, about what's gonna happen... RUBENSTEIN: Because Hoover wanted to close the banks, and Roosevelt said, "I'm not doing that," and then... SORKIN: Said, "I'm not doing that."

And of course, literally within 48 hours of getting the job, that's exactly what Roosevelt does.

So, closes, closes the banks.

There was what's called a bank, uh, bank holiday, effectively and allows some of the banks to be merged.

By the way, that was another big problem.

You could not merge banks, uh, back then.

And that was something a lot of people thought that you really needed a community bank.

And so to allow, uh, you know, banks to banks to be, uh, buying other banks, that was something that was sort of not encouraged either.

And then the other big thing that Roosevelt did was the creation, effectively of the SEC, uh, the creation of what turned out to be, uh, the Glass-Steagall bill, which breaks up the banks.

So, the commercial banking and what might be described as the casino portion of banking, uh, are separated.

RUBENSTEIN: But you described in your book... SORKIN: Yep.

RUBENSTEIN: ...how the Glass-Steagall Act... SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: ...um, was gonna separate the Commercial banks from the, the investment banks.

But there was one bank that that was maybe not gonna apply to, JP Morgan.

They thought that they could stay doing investment banking, commercial banking because they were private, right?

SORKIN: And that was the whole idea.

Exactly.

So the original bill that Carter Glass, a senator from Virginia.

He was the Elizabeth Warren of his time.

And he wanted to break up the banks, uh, except that he didn't necessarily wanna break up JP Morgan.

He wanted to break up the big publicly traded banks.

But interestingly, I think a lot of people hold up the Glass-Steagall bill as some kind of, you know, bastion of the way, you know, great politicians can do amazing things.

The bill is possibly one of the most corrupted bills you could possibly imagine.

Part of that bill was written by a banker, um, that worked for the Rockefeller's, who was attached to Chase at the time.

And they rewrote the bill so that they could stick it to JP Morgan.

In fact, part of the bill was written to actually screw over their competition.

And then I found a whole bunch of letters from Carter Glass lamenting how he felt that actually this bill was taken away from him, and actually that even though he devoted three years of his life at the last second, Roosevelt was all of a sudden taking meetings with the bankers, uh, over how this bill should actually get written.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, Carter Glass was somebody that Roosevelt wanted to have as his Secretary of Treasury.

SORKIN: Originally, yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And why didn't he take that job?

SORKIN: So Carter Glass had a couple things going on.

Carter Glass had a big ego, and Carter really wanted this bill to be passed more than anything.

He was not convinced that Roosevelt was actually gonna support the bill the whole time.

And the other thing was that Carter Glass really believed in sort of the old school financial system.

And I think that he thought that Roosevelt was gonna do some wild, wild things to the economy that he was not gonna sign up for.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, who was Steagall of Glass-Steagall?

SORKIN: So, Steagall was a, a fascinating guy who became sort of an asterisk in this whole story to Carter Glass 'cause Carter Glass sort of, um, you know, overpowered him just verbally in almost every way except that Steagall was smarter.

Steagall was responsible for the FDIC in that bill, by the way, something that Carter Glass and Roosevelt were against.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, to remind everybody, the idea that banks would, uh, guarantee or the US government through FDIC would guarantee deposits, that didn't exist at the time.

SORKIN: Didn't exist.

And that was anathema to Hoover, it was anathema to Roosevelt because the idea that the US government, taxpayers, were gonna guarantee people's deposits to them seemed completely crazy.

And also, they had a view about competition in banking, and they thought, if you have an FDIC, it's gonna make all the banks equal.

And they thought that was completely unfair.

RUBENSTEIN: All right, so let's talk about Mr.

JP Morgan.

SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: The famous JP Morgan.

Talk about who he was, how he became so powerful.

Was he smarter than everybody else, or how did he become such a legend?

SORKIN: Well, he built the bank.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

SORKIN: Um, and the bank became probably... It wasn't probably, it was the most powerful bank in the country RUBENSTEIN: And was always a private bank.

But he made all the decisions.

SORKIN: He made all of the decisions, and they were involved in everything.

I mean, talk about, you know, the right hand and the left hand doing all sorts of... I mean, every... They were involved in every, in every possible deal that could possibly be... RUBENSTEIN: Now, he was a very powerful man- SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And had unlimited ability to get things done.

He had a son who was not as gifted.

SORKIN: To Jack Morgan's credit, he knew he was limited.

And, even though he's made the CEO of the bank, he decides he can't really do it.

And so he effectively, uh, assigns a guy named Thomas Lamont to run the bank for him.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, Thomas Lamont is a person who worked his way up from where?

Where was he?

SORKIN: He had been involved in a couple of banks prior to that.

But when he gets to JP Morgan, um, he becomes the ultimate client kind of guy.

And he knew every CEO in the world.

He would dine with Mussolini.

He would dine with Hitler.

He was, he was everywhere all at once.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

There's a bank called National City Bank... SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: ...which is a predecessor of Citi.

SORKIN: It's what becomes, becomes Citigroup later, and that's run by Charlie Mitchell.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, Charlie Mitchell is an interesting character.

The only person in your book, pretty much, who's indicted for a lot of these things.

SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: What did he do that deserved to be indicted?

SORKIN: National City was the biggest bank in the country and was on its way to being the biggest bank in the world.

And so he really was... Forget about Thomas Lamont, Jack, he was the Jamie Dimon of his time.

I mean, talk about covers of magazines.

That was "Sunshine Charlie."

And, he had made a lot of, uh, money in cash in the year 1929, but had a massive loss, a, a massive stock loss.

So he had a lot of losses that he wanted to take, but he didn't want to realize those losses, if you will.

RUBENSTEIN: He didn't want the public to know that he was selling stock of his bank?

SORKIN: And he didn't wanna sell the stock.

He also... RUBENSTEIN: Right.

SORKIN: Didn't feel comfortable selling the stock.

So he sold to his wife, um, in a sort of sham transaction that was never really recorded, but sort of recorded.

RUBENSTEIN: It's a big indictment, and then everybody thinks he's gonna go to jail.

And then what happens?

SORKIN: Well, the fascinating part was that the jury decides that he's not guilty.

But what's so interesting to me about it, and the way... I tried to tell the story is the reason we have Glass-Steagall and so many of the other laws that was passed on the back of the public thinking.

'Cause the trial was going on, and there was a lot of attention on this case that got the whole country so angry at Wall Street, that it actually led Roosevelt and everybody else to finally support Carter Glass' bill.

And I would actually argue to you that had he been, uh, acquitted earlier, or that case never brought, that it would've been very hard to actually implement some of these laws.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, Mitchell, in the end, what happens?

He is, he has to leave the bank after he is indicted.

I assume he doesn't go back to the bank.

SORKIN: He has a, uh, what I've discovered as a fallow period.

Uh, he had to sell the house, uh, or, or the mansion on, on Fifth Avenue and a whole bunch of other homes and other things that he had.

But he actually was probably one of the few characters who turned it around ultimately.

Uh, he went to work in another bank, much smaller bank, um, and lived a, lived, lived a decent life.

Most of the others, characters, in this book, uh, either ultimately commit suicide, uh, lose everything, or something otherwise relatively terrible happens.

RUBENSTEIN: Um, what about Lamont?

What happened to him?

SORKIN: Well, Lamont, uh, maybe you could argue he, he did okay.

He, he sort of stuck it out.

Uh, but he gets involved in a whole other sort of reputational crisis unto, unto itself, by the way, including his involvement with Hitler, which is its own... It's a separate book, frankly.

Um, but one of the banker's, uh, brothers, now we're, now we're getting into the, the Whitneys.

Ultimately, I think created some real reputational damage, uh, for Thomas Lamont because, uh, JP Morgan and Thomas Lamont, uh, effectively had given money, uh, to Richard Whitney, who had run the New York Stock Exchange... RUBENSTEIN: Well, let's talk.. SORKIN: ...and ultimately ends up in Sing Sing.

RUBENSTEIN: ...Right.

This is a very interesting story.

Richard Whitney at the time the market is crashing... SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: ...he goes onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and what does he do?

He's... SORKIN: He's literally buying shares on behalf of, of Thomas Lamont and a whole bunch of bankers to try to support the market.

RUBENSTEIN: And, and it became famous.

People said this- SORKIN: And became famous for doing it and for- RUBENSTEIN: For saving the stock market.

SORKIN: For a hot minute, it worked until of course, it didn't.

RUBENSTEIN: But then what happened to him?

He ultimately did what that led to his going to jail?

SORKIN: His crimes were not of 1929.

He sort of becomes famous for what he did in 1929, and then later on, he effectively was running his own brokerage firm and other... And he was basically stealing money from the pension funds of some of the members of the New York Stock Exchange.

He was sort of running a Ponzi scheme of sorts to fulfill some of the payments that he had lost, he was asking his brother, who worked at JP Morgan, for money.

And of course, how was his brother getting the money?

He was getting it from Thomas Lamont.

RUBENSTEIN: Wow.

Okay.

So, um, there's one person you mentioned, uh, Raskob.

SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Who was, at the time, a very prominent person, became the head of the Democratic National Committee I think at one point.

SORKIN: This is the guy I told you about, General Motors originally.

Makes a fortune, uh, then makes a fortune in the markets, then decides to get into politics.

He actually had been a Republican, decides that he could be... Befriend Al Smith.

So he decides he'll just become a Democrat.

Not only does he become a Democrat, decides he's gonna run the Democratic Party.

Al Smith loses to Hoover.

This guy had never lost anything in his whole life, John Raskob, never.

And he was furious.

Literally in the spring of 1929, before there was ever crash, he funded an operation, a secret operation, run, run by a guy named Charlie Michelson to effectively seed stories in newspapers around the country, um, to effectively ruin the reputation of Hoover and I actually would argue that one of the reasons that Hoover has such a terrible reputation even today is because of what John Raskob was doing to him the entire time.

But to me, he was also a bit of a philosopher king.

In November of 1929, he writes a paper about how we, Americans, should have a five-day workweek.

Back then, we all worked six days a week.

In fact, the stock market was open on Saturdays.

And he had this idea that we should work five, uh, five days a week.

Not because he was such a nice guy and thought everybody needs some time off, but because he thought it would actually spur the economy.

Because if you had more time, two days rather than just one, more people would buy cars, 'cause they'd have places to go.

They'd buy gardening equipment.

They'd buy different outfits to go out to parties on the weekend.

RUBENSTEIN: Are those five days that you have to show up in the office every day, too or you could work from home?

SORKIN: Well, you know, Zoom didn't work then.

So... RUBENSTEIN: Now, one of the characters in your book committed suicide.

SORKIN: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: He was the biggest short seller.

Can you describe his background and why he committed suicide in the end?

SORKIN: Jesse Livermore was a short seller.

And, uh, like any, maybe some of the great traders, he was a bit of an emotional wreck of a human being.

And he had made a fortune shorting the market, uh, in the early 20s.

Uh, he was sort of a very outspoken, uh, short seller.

So he was in the papers all the time.

But interestingly, by the time, uh, 1929 rolled around, he was almost outta business because you couldn't really short, the market was going up every day.

He ends up making about $100 million, probably the most profitable trade of that time.

Maybe he'd be like the John Paulson sort, like "The Big Short," uh, of, of his time.

And so by 1932, he had lost virtually all of the $100 million he had made.

Uh, he sort of went up and went down and went up and went down.

And by the way, he had multiple wives and multiple girlfriends, and he was drinking and all sorts of things.

And ends up, uh, walking into The Sherry-Netherland on Fifth Avenue, into the cloakroom and shooting himself in the head.

RUBENSTEIN: Wow.

Well, I don't want to end on that.

So let's... SORKIN: Well, let, let's talk a... I'll give you a character we haven't talked about, my favorite character in the whole book, Evangeline Adams was an astrologer... RUBENSTEIN: Oh, yes.

SORKIN: ...in New York City.

And she was the most famous astrologer in the country.

And people, including JP Morgan when he was still alive, would go... Charlie Chaplin.

Everybody would go visit with her to find out what was gonna happen in the stock market.

And she used to keep a table at the Plaza Hotel.

People would come visit her there.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

SORKIN: She had a place at Carnegie Hall on 57th Street.

And she had a newsletter.

She had 100,000 su... Uh, subscribers.

People would come visit, it cost $50.

$50 for an hour of her time, like, like going to see a psychiatrist.

And she famously told the world, um, in, in the fall of 1929, that the stock market was going to go to the heavens.

And, uh, boy was she wrong.

She lost everything too and died in 1932.

RUBENSTEIN: So, um, it's a terrific read.

I enjoyed it.

Um, I think people can learn a lot about it and, uh, obviously, I hope, uh, we don't suffer from something like that again.

SORKIN: Let's hope.

RUBENSTEIN: Thank you very much, Andrew.

SORKIN: Thank you, David.

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