Observances

I remember my father talking about the 1920’s when his stepfather died leaving him at 12 years old as the breadwinner for him and his mother on a 75 acre farm. He got a job riding the lead mule for Mr. John Tyner’s roadbuilding crew working on a large dirt scraper. This was the closing era of the Gilded Age when the urban well off ruled the country and rural farmers were going broke due to the worldwide oversupply of farm crops. The rich were feasting on the roaring stock market along with easy credit supplied by brokerage houses to buy more stock. It was a story as old as the ages where a mania takes hold and people think wealth can simply be created out of the air while the less informed struggle to survive by going to work each day. When it was all over, a lot of the idle rich were in the same condition as the working stiffs, just trying to survive and some of them decided to come down to earth out of the windows in tall buildings. They forgot one of the principles of investing is not the return ON your capital, but the return OF your capital.