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Quotes of the Day for 24 October 2004 - Crash

Seventy five years ago today, 24 October 1929, is called Black Thursday. A frothy bull market in stocks had the whole country talking about the market, but trees can't grow to the sky and prices fell quickly in record trading. By noon at least eleven serious speculators had defenestrated themselves and their broken bodies had been carted away. The ticker was running an hour and a half behind, investors were selling without having any idea what the price would be. Some major players stepped in to stop the fall, so the loss on the day wasn't fatal. But the reasons for the reversal in the market were still very real and the bottom dropped out on Monday and Tuesday. These quotes seem to fit today's history.

Anyone who thinks there's safety in numbers hasn't looked at the stock market pages.
     - Irene Peter

There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profits.... All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.
     - Edgar Degas, 1834 - 1917

I told them that my grandfather had died in the Great Crash of 1929 - a stockbroker jumped out of a window and crushed him and his pushcart down below.
     - Mario Cuomo

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness.
     - Federico García Lorca, 1898 - 1936

The freedom to make a fortune on the Stock Exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.
     - John Mortimer

The only reason to invest in the market is because you think you know something others don?t.
     - R. Foster Winans

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