Summary of Scott Nations's A History of the United States in Five Crashes

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Theodore Roosevelt was elected president in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley. He was governor of New York when McKinley selected him to replace his first vice president, who died in 1899 from a string of heart ailments.
#2 Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in 1898, despite having little political experience. He was called the cyclone assemblyman for his reformist ideas, and he angered many businessmen by exposing a financial relationship between financier Jay Gould and Supreme Court justice Theodoric Westbrook.
#3 Roosevelt was elected president in 1901, and his first act was to promise that he would continue the policy of President McKinley for the peace and prosperity of America.
#4 The American economy had expanded rapidly from 1896 to 1900, when annual economic growth averaged 6 percent. The stock market had been booming, and American businesses were growing in size and complexity.

Sujets

• Politique
• Economic history

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 26 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669365082
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Scott Nations's A History of the United States in Five Crashes
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Theodore Roosevelt was elected president in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley. He was governor of New York when McKinley selected him to replace his first vice president, who died in 1899 from a string of heart ailments.

#2

Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in 1898, despite having little political experience. He was called the cyclone assemblyman for his reformist ideas, and he angered many businessmen by exposing a financial relationship between financier Jay Gould and Supreme Court justice Theodoric Westbrook.

#3

Roosevelt was elected president in 1901, and his first act was to promise that he would continue the policy of President McKinley for the peace and prosperity of America.

#4

The American economy had expanded rapidly from 1896 to 1900, when annual economic growth averaged 6 percent. The stock market had been booming, and American businesses were growing in size and complexity.

#5

When Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy, he had professed that only those who dared greatly in war were worthy. Now he seemed to have found his work akin to war, and he wanted to regulate the corporate form.

#6

On May 9, 1901, the day Northern Pacific reached its peak, the market fell dramatically. The New York Times described it as a disaster and ruin. Eventually, the protagonists realized they could go on fighting each other or they could join forces in the sort of industrial trust that Standard Oil had perfected.

#7

The Supreme Court ruled in 1895 that manufacturing was not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act, because it was a local activity not involving among the several States. This effectively put control of monopolies beyond the reach of the Sherman Act.

#8

The J. P. Morgan example proved to be a bad one, as he was soon hated by the public for his quote about not owing the public anything. Theodore Roosevelt, on the other hand, believed in power, and used it to go after the trusts.

#9

On March 10, 1902, Knox filed the official complaint against Northern Securities in federal court in Minnesota, and the verdict was announced on April 9, 1903, which was a victory for the government. The stock market held up well on Thursday afternoon and closed for the week as the decision was being digested.

#10

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a disaster that many cities were insured against. However, the only way to get insurance payments was after your house burned down. So, in the days following the quake, many citizens set their own homes on fire.

#11

The San Francisco insurance market was an oddity. For decades, most of the city’s fire insurance had been written by British companies because the city had many London-based banks ready to finance grain shipments to Britain. When the first fire insurance firm was established in 1852, foreign or domestic, half of all policies were still issued by British companies.

#12

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was the catalyst for the Panic of 1907, which was the result of President Roosevelt’s attack on Standard Oil. Roosevelt had declared Standard Oil to be under investigation on June 22, 1906, and charged it with 6,428 different violations of the Elkins anti-rebate law.

#13

In 1906, Roosevelt filed a lawsuit against Standard Oil in St. Louis, demanding the breakup of the company. He was attacking the way Standard Oil made its money, and he was targeting the way it paid out those profits.

#14

The trial of Standard Oil v. United States began on March 4, 1907. The stock market weakened, and investors were wary of the outcome because public opinion was against Standard Oil.

#15

Roosevelt’s speech at the Gridiron Club dinner in 1907 was extremely inflammatory, and it showed that he was looking for a battle, not just a means of doing right by the governed. He made it personal, which caused investors to wonder where he might stop.

#16

In 1907, the government created a new policy that would bring the trusts into compliance with the law. The Dow fell 2. 3 percent the next two days, and was now down 14. 6 percent for 1907 to date.

#17

The stock market continued to drop, and by August 20, 1907, the Dow was down 25. 8 percent for the year. Roosevelt once again attacked the businessmen he believed were to blame for America’s ills, and the only thing preventing a few leaders of the predatory industrial trusts from going to prison was the difficulty in getting a jury to see things his way.

#18

Heinze was an engineer who raised $300,000 and went to work for himself by leasing Butte’s Estrella mine from one Jim Murray, considered by many to be the shrewdest man in Butte. Heinze was unscrupulous, and all agreed that he was tough in an era when that really meant something.

#19

Heinze had been born in Brooklyn, but he returned to Manhattan in 1907. He had settled near Wall Street because he wanted to do for finance what he had done for copper mining in Montana.

#20

In 1907, Morse had control of three banks, and was on the board of directors of seven. He had invested in thirty-one others, and was the king of chain banking, in which a little cash was used to buy just enough stock in a bank to gain control.

#21

In an attempt to reverse the downward trend in the price of United Copper, Fritz's first move as a New York financier was to launch a stock pool. The pool was an extremely risky play. If the price of copper kept dropping, the value of United Copper shares would fall even more.

#22

The Heinzes thought that if they bought even more shares of United Copper just as they were demanding delivery of the shares they already owned, they would pressure the short sellers and force them to pay a higher price than they might have otherwise.