《股票作手回忆录·第九章·1907大恐慌·做空封神》第23节
When the commission houses found out there was not a cent to be had at any price I knew the time had come. I sent brokers into the various crowds. Why, at one time there wasn’t a single bid for Union Pacific. Not at any price! Think of it! And in other stocks the same thing. No money to hold stocks and nobody to buy them. I had enormous paper profits and the certainty that all that I had to do to smash prices still more was to send in orders to sell ten thousand shares each of Union Pacific and of a half dozen other good dividend-paying stocks and what would follow would be simply hell. It seemed to me that the panic that would be precipitated would be of such an intensity and character that the board of governors would deem it advisable to close the Exchange, as was done in August, 1914, when the World War broke out. It would mean greatly increased profits on paper. It might also mean an inability to convert those profits into actual cash. But there were other things to consider, and one was that a further break would retard the recovery that I was beginning to figure on, the compensating improvement after all that blood-letting. Such a panic would do much harm to the country generally.
注释摘要
这段文字是整个1907年大恐慌中最具戏剧张力的时刻，也是拉里·利文斯顿作为投机者一生中最接近“神坛”的瞬间。要理解它在金融史上的分量，我们必须先还原当时那个已经彻底窒息的市场环境。这里提到“佣金行”发现无论报什么价格都借不到一分钱，指的是纽约证券交易所内的资金拆借市场已经完全冻结。在当时的制度下，经纪人替客户持仓靠的是向银行借入的活期拆放贷款，也就是所谓的…