1938 ~ The Market Place by Alexander Noyes 1st Ed. ~ Wall Street ~ Stock Market

Description: The Market PlaceReminiscences of a Financial Editor Alexander Dana Noyes 1938 First and only edition A very good copy with some wear to the spine ends and corners. Small bump on the upper edge of the rear cover. Otherwise, the book is nice, bright and clean. Alexander Dana Noyes was a distinguished American financial columnist born in Montclair, New Jersey in 1862. The son of a merchant, Noyes got his start in journalism with The Commercial Advertiser, where he reluctantly became the paper’s Wall Street correspondent in 1884 when the banking house Grant and Moore failed and he happened to be the only reporter in the office not on assignment. Noyes recalls these formative experiences in The Market Place: Reminiscences of a Financial Editor, a memoir that tends to pay more attention to historically significant financial crises than to autobiographic milestones. When Noyes began work as a financial editor of the New York Tribune in 1891, most financial columns in the popular press were “tout” pieces (writings advertising risk-free investments as insider tips) and agency handouts, meant more to promote certain investments than to illuminate the inner-workings of the market. According to historian Robert Sobel, Noyes was one of the first American journalists “to combine economic analysis and a knowledge of the market in such a way as to interest the general reader”. Through his work as a reporter and financial editor for the Tribune and New York Evening Post, Noyes covered the Great Panic of 1891, the 1907 Banker’s Panic, and the closure of the stock market in 1914, establishing himself as an American counterpart to Walter Bagehot (editor of London’s The Economist), which is to say that he was read by serious students of the market and had a trans-Atlantic audience. During his career, Noyes also authored several books, including Forty Years of American Finance (1907) and The War Period in American Finance (1926), which would become standard financial histories in university circles. He started writing the monthly “Financial World” feature for Scribner’s Magazine in August 1915. Noyes initially used this space in the magazine to discuss the financial problems arising from the outbreak of World War I, but the feature (later known as “The Financial Situation”) would continue to run well past the war.In his article “The Speculative Markets,” Noyes warns against the belief on Wall Street that America had entered a New Era that “differs so greatly from any in the past that old-fashioned precaution is out of date”. Always critical of unchecked speculation and current trends, Noyes consistently emphasized his belief that clues to the contemporary marketplace are revealed by a historical knowledge of finance: [The speculative 1901 bull market assumed] that we were living in a New Era; that old rules and principles and precedent of finance were obsolete; that things could safely be done to-day which had been dangerous or impossible in the past. This illusion seized on the public mind in 1901 (in New York at any rate) quite as firmly as it did in 1929. It differed only in the fact that there were no college professors in 1901 who preached the popular illusion as their new political economy. (The Market Place pg.195) This style of historical analogy, illustrated above by his comparing the speculation of 1901 and the Depression of 1929, is a staple of Noyes’ prose. In the numerous articles he wrote for Scribner’s, Noyes uses a similar strategy of analogy to describe World War I, using The Seven Years’ War, America’s Civil War, and the Napoleonic Wars to draw out questions about America’s apparent wartime prosperity and the fate of Europe’s economy following the war. Several of Noyes’ contributions to Scribner’s Magazine during the war years were compiled into a book, Financial Chapters of War. In 1920 Noyes became the financial editor of the New York Times, where he continued to prove himself an adept reader of the market. During his tenure at the Times, Noyes predicted the bull market that would emerge in 1921 and was “one of only a few voices that chose not to sing in the all-bulls choir” the led up to Black Tuesday in 1929. The skepticism of the Times in the months leading up to the Depression strongly contrasts with the outlook of the Wall Street Journal and several other financial publications that failed to realize the danger signs in the market. Noyes remained at the Times until his death in 1945.

Price: 175 USD

Location: Missouri City, Texas

End Time: 2024-09-21T22:31:47.000Z

Shipping Cost: 5.75 USD