《股票作手回忆录·第三章·初到纽约·对赌行的赢法为何失灵》第7节
We ran into the big boom of 1901 and I made a great deal of money--that is, for a boy. You remember those times? The prosperity of the country was unprecedented. We not only ran into an era of industrial consolidations and combinations of capital that beat anything we had had up to that time, but the public went stock mad. In previous flush times, I have heard, Wall Street used to brag of two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-share days, when securities of a par value of twenty-five million dollars changed hands. But in 1901 we had a three-million-share day. Everybody was making money. The steel crowd came to town, a horde of millionaires with no more regard for money than drunken sailors. The only game that satisfied them was the stock market. We had some of the biggest high rollers the Street ever saw: John W. Gates, of ‘Bet-you-a-million’ fame, and his friends, like John A. Drake, Loyal Smith, and the rest; the Reid-Leeds-Moore crowd, who sold part of their steel holdings and with the proceeds bought in the open market the actual majority of the stock of the great Rock Island system; and Schwab and Frick and Phipps and the Pittsburg coterie; to say nothing of scores of men who were lost in the shuffle but would have been called great plungers at any other time. A fellow could buy and sell all the stock there was. Keene made a market for the U.S. Steel shares. A broker sold one hundred thousand shares in a few minutes. A wonderful time! And there were some wonderful winnings. And no taxes to pay on stock sales! And no day of reckoning in sight.
注释摘要
1901 年的大繁荣是美国金融史上的一个传奇时刻。要理解这段文字的历史场景，得先知道当时的美国经济正经历一场史无前例的工业整合运动。摩根、洛克菲勒这些金融巨头在 1890 年代末到 1900 年代初，通过大规模并购重组了钢铁、铁路、石油等核心产业，形成了像美国钢铁公司这样的庞然大物。这些工业合并不只是商业行为，它们在华尔街催生出一轮又一轮的股票发行和投机狂…