YouSaid · the spoken record

Greg Steinmetz

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-10-06
most recent: 2022-10-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But as you mentioned, The US issued greenbacks which untethered dollars from physical gold. We were on the gold standard before that to finance the war. The North had to issue Money that wasn't backed by anything just like today, but unlike today, they promised that once they won the war and financial conditions improved they would redeem it in gold. In between that time, the gold prize fluctuated relative to the greenback because the governments declared intention was to bring them back to parity, the tendency of the gold price was to narrow versus the greenback price. Gold thought that, well, there might be an opportunity to make money here because everyone believed that the tendency of gold was to fall versus the greenback. He said, well, if I buy gold and then after I buy all my gold, convince people that hey, this redemption is not going to happen for a while, that the government is going to let the gold price run for a while.”
2022-10-06 · Forward Guidance · Learning From the Most Ruthless Robber Baron (Jay Gould) | Greg Steinmetz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the courts were friendly to Gould because Gould had bribed all the judges. So that was the most egregious example of how Gould was a crook, and it's the thing that really makes his legacy. What's interesting is after that, Gould cleaned up his act a little bit. Fisk ended up getting killed. He was involved in a romance with a woman whose, I guess she was like a prostitute and Fisk paid her to be around. She had a boyfriend on the side, the boyfriend tried to Fisk down for money, got in trouble for that, he ends up shooting Fisk dead. And once Fisk was out of the pitcher, Gould cleaned up his act a little bit and made money the old fashioned way by buying and selling without having to brabe judges. The fact is he did it, and if he asked me what the most reprehensible thing you ever did, that was it.”
2022-10-06 · Forward Guidance · Learning From the Most Ruthless Robber Baron (Jay Gould) | Greg Steinmetz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he also paid off a bunch of judges to do what he wanted to do. It all came to a head on Black Friday when Gold began to sell his gold price after running up the price. And the way he ran it up was his buddy Jim Fisk entered into a bunch of trades to buy gold. He bought contracts to buy it. He didn't have to put down that much money, but people thought that he was good for the money. It drove the gold price way up while it was high, Gould was able to liquidate, and then when people started to doubt his friend Jim Fisk's ability to honor those contracts, the price crashed and Fisk never honored his obligations, but got away with it.”
2022-10-06 · Forward Guidance · Learning From the Most Ruthless Robber Baron (Jay Gould) | Greg Steinmetz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of what he did was A lot of what he did was just trying to deprive other rich people of their money before they did it to him. But the thing that bothers me most about gold, and it's the thing where he's best known for is Black Friday. In 1869 where he blew up the gold market in an attempt to corner it. The way he did that was he tried to get President Grant to buy into his scheme of letting the gold price go up after Gold had bought a bunch of it. He tried to bribe Grant, Grant himself was incorruptible, but he did get Grant's brother in law roped into this. He got the assistant secretary of the Treasury involved in this by paying him off.”
2022-10-06 · Forward Guidance · Learning From the Most Ruthless Robber Baron (Jay Gould) | Greg Steinmetz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's legal for you to use your brother in law's printing business or some other vendor that you have a relationship with without disclosing it to shareholders, would you do it? Gould did this kind of stuff, which was morally reprehensible but legal. But he also did things like bribe judges and lawmakers. And that's not something that you're allowed to do. But because he had judges in his back pocket, because he had lawmakers in his back pocket, he got away with all this.”
2022-10-06 · Forward Guidance · Learning From the Most Ruthless Robber Baron (Jay Gould) | Greg Steinmetz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's interesting you say that because if you look at the list of all time richest Americans which people have put together by comparing wealth divided by GDP, you see that in the top 20, the only ones who made their money on Wall Street were Warren Buffett and Jay Gould. Everyone else, it's a company that they started and just ran with it, whether it be Amazon or Microsoft or in the case of Rockefeller Standard Oil. Gold made it by buying and selling, by being a capital allocator. Very different than Buffett, while Buffett is the model of integrity. Gold is the model of corruption. Now, if I were to ask you, hey, if insider trading were legal, would you do it? You didn't have to answer the question, but think about it. If it's morally reprehensible but legal, do you do it? If you're the CEO of a company and”
2022-10-06 · Forward Guidance · Learning From the Most Ruthless Robber Baron (Jay Gould) | Greg Steinmetz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and Carnegie, Vanderbilt, they built their fortunes much more aligned with what we think of as capital earnings in terms of they had companies which generate a profit and then sort of they made money via that. Whereas Jay Gould did a lot of financial speculation. He bought shares, made himself a director, then he sold shares short, he paid himself special dividends. Can you speak to sort of the financial sleight of hand that was key to his ability to make money?”
2022-10-06 · Forward Guidance · Learning From the Most Ruthless Robber Baron (Jay Gould) | Greg Steinmetz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From consciousness even though I think he was the most interesting of the robber barons, and he was certainly the biggest robber of the robber barons, so he deserves more of the public spotlight than he's been getting.”
2022-10-06 · Forward Guidance · Learning From the Most Ruthless Robber Baron (Jay Gould) | Greg Steinmetz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my first book was about a Renaissance banker, a guy from the Middle Ages in Germany named Jacob Fuger, and what drew me to him was I was living in Germany at the time and everyone in Germany knew the name Fuger just as Americans know Rockefeller, but no one in America had heard anything about him, so I thought, huh, this is interesting. It's probably something that people should know about, and I would love to be the person who introduces him to an American audience. And it was kind of the same with gold. Gold is a name that people know, but they don't know much about him. As they ask my Wall Street friends about him, they say, yeah, I've heard of him. He was a robber baron, and after that it was blank stairs. You have Carnegie Vanderbelt and Rockefeller. There are things named after them. There's nothing named after J Gold, so people, you know, he just slipped from.”
2022-10-06 · Forward Guidance · Learning From the Most Ruthless Robber Baron (Jay Gould) | Greg Steinmetz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT