Descripción
[8],152,[1]pp., plus folding table. Small octavo. Original blue cloth, spine gilt, blind ruled borders. Shallow chips at head of spine. Faint soiling to edges of text block. Contemporary bookplate on front free endpaper, with tanning to the bookplate from the paste used to affix it. Internally clean. Near fine. In original printed ecru dust jacket (spine tanned, chipped at extremities, corners of flaps clipped (not affecting price statement). An uncommon study of investment trusts, written near the height of the financial boom of the 1920s encouraging investment in a financial instrument that would ultimately help trigger the Great Crash of 1929. It was the first book on investment trusts published in the United States to provide a full treatment of the subject for broad popular consumption. Williams' book was advertised as providing "information on one of the latest and most active developments in American finance," and was intended as a general guide to small, middle class investors as to the history of the investment trust, how they are constructed and managed as well as the benefits to the investor. Investment trusts were financial instruments developed in Great Britain in the 1880s that eventually became popular in the United States in the late 1920s, especially with small investors looking to break into the booming stock market, and were similar to modern mutual funds in that the trusts were also created by purchasing stocks using pooled money from many small investors. There was no federal regulation of investment trusts, and market fluctuations in the stocks of one trust greatly affected all the other trusts that had invested in it. When the stock market crashed in October,1929, all the intertwined trusts collapsed. Marshall H. Williams was a Yale graduate (class of 19116), and the New Haven-branch manager for Richardson, Hill and Co., a well-established and respected Boston investment bank and a member of the New York, Boston and Chicago stock exchanges. Williams may have published this work as a promotional tool for investment trusts (and his firm) and to reassure cautious investors. Although the book does ask the investor to do their homework vis-à-vis trust content and management, it paints a rosy overall view of investment trusts and states: "One result of the advent of investment trusts in the United States may likely be a certain amount of price stabilization in our security markets" and that during periods of volatility in the markets, the investment trust will ".on one hand restore public confidence, and on the other will check over-speculation in a time of abundant prosperity." John Kenneth Galbraith called investment trusts "the most notable piece of speculative architecture of the late twenties." Published on the eve of one of the greatest financial calamity of the 20th century, this book illuminates the use of a financial instrument that ultimately played a key role in the collapse of the markets that led to the Great Depression. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929. Boston, New York: Mariner Books, 2009. pp.46-47, 49, 206. Matthew DiLallo, What Caused the Stock Market Crash of 1929? The Motley Fool, 11 July, 2022. Dr. Harold Bierman, Jr., "The 1929 Stock Market Crash," in the Economic History Association Encyclopedia (online). Joseph G. Martin, A Century of Finance, Martin 's History of the Boston Stock and Money Markets. Boston: published by the author, 1898. p.236. N° de ref. del artículo WRCAM58591
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