Cezary Salad

Way down in New York’s financial district, tucked away inconspicuously on the southern end of Wall Street, there’s a little gem of a museum - the Museum of American Finance - filled with all kinds of goodies from 200+ years of booms and busts on, well, Wall Street.

With $8 admisson and a new exhibit about the credit crisis that just opened up this week, it is well worth a Saturday afternoon visit - followed up with a beer at Ulysses down the street.  

The museum’s been around since 1987 but it is only in the last two years that it’s held its current spot on Wall Street - an old Bank of New York branch converted into a giant exhibition hall.

Below are some of my highlights - enjoy.

Obscure monies

My favorite exhibit was the museum’s collection of obscure coins and notes spanning the pre-colonial era to the latest money coming out of the US mint.

We used to have a lot of higher-denomination notes in circulation but Nixon apparently axed them in 1969 in an effort to fight organized crime. McKinley graces the $500 bill and Grover Cleveland landed himself a sweet spot on the $1,000 bill.

You can still use them as legal tender but if you come across one, might as well sell to a collector: they sell for multiples of their face value these days.

I had no idea that these people sat on dollar bills:

$5,000 bill - James Madison

$10,000 bill - Salmon Chase (the banker who puts the “Chase” in JPMorgan Chase)

$100,000 bill - Woodrow Wilson (the president who created the Federal Reserve)

The Wilson note was only used in circulation among Federal Reserve Banks. It makes you wonder, though: if we’re so into putting obscure presidents on our higher-denomination bills, why isn’t there a Millard Fillmore note? It’s about time he got a seat on US currency.

The museum also has a fascinating selection of Depression-era currencies created by localities suffering cash shortages. My favorite was the hand-writtten 50 cent scrip (upper left hand corner in picture above) from Albany County, Wyoming.

Stock and bond certificates

They also have on display some famous stock and bond certificates that have been issued in the US, going back to an IOU signed by George Washington. My favorite, though, was this stock certificate for the Erie Railway, company:

The Erie was the focus of the legendary showdown between industrial tycoons Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould. Gould spurned Vanderbilt’s takeover of the Erie by issuing watered-down stock that was worth more than the value of the company - which, apparently, was legal back in those days.

This one’s signed by “the Devil of Wall Street” himself:

Also on display: some pretty interesting municipal bonds, like this one issued by New York for bridge repairs:

How Wall Street got its start

One of the coolest things I learned was how Wall Street - specifically, the New York Stock Exchange (below) got its start.

Apparently, back in the early days of the Republic brokers used to trade stocks in the open on Wall Street and would gather under specific lamp posts along the street to deal in specific securities. People would stand on roofs to make announcements and give signals, so it must have been a pretty hectic scene.

In 1792, a group of 28 brokers got tired of this system and organized a brokerage club that served as the beginning of what is today the NYSE.

Old equipment

The museum also has a lot of technological relics from the old days of Wall Street, including an early form of a calculator that belonged to the comptroller of Lehman Brothers - now itself a Wall Street relic. Below are some of my favorites:

A 1981 Quotron - one of the first computer systems used for trading stocks:

And, of course, the first stock tickers. They were invented in 1867 - this one vintage 1875:

Together, the stock ticker and the telegraph revolutionized the speed at which stocks could be traded. The two inventions put the New York Stock Exchange - and with it, American Capitalism - on growth steroids for decades.

Vintage newspapers

As a journalist, I was particularly drawn to the collection of famous editions of newspapers from panics and crises over the ages. To be fair, American printing presses have probably created their own collection of these future museum pieces just within the last 18 months, but it is interesting to look back to see how thoe events were covered.

An edition of the Daily News from 25 October, 1929 read: “Billions lost in Wall St. Debacle”. Much more interesting than the headline, though, is the advice given by the paper’s “Trader” columnist.

Four days before Black Tuesday - when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 12% and officially heralded the beginning of the Great Depression-  his advice read as follows (emphasis added):

If half the suicides which were reported to “TRADER” yesterday had proved true, Wall Street would be a deserted village this morning.

Happily, however, they all turned out to be baseless rumors, although it was amazing how many stories were in circulation as to operators who jumped out of windows at 120 Broadway. The Equitable building certainly got a lot of free advertising, although it wasn’t the kind usually welcomed.

The market today is in the position of a convalescent who has just successfully passed a crisis in an illness which bid fair to be fatal.

Improvement is indicated, with the practical certainty of eventual recovery, but there will be relapses.

“TRADER” therefore advises against speculative purchases, although he expects prices will be materially higher today. If you have money to buy stocks outright, go in and do so, because current prices are bargains which probably will never be sustainable again as long as the United States continues its present prosperity.

Some parallels are clearly visible to today - especially in light of the recent debate sparked by Jon Stewart’s spoof of stock picker Jim Cramer and CNBC coverage of the credit crisis. People routinely call the bottom prematurely, so the only way to know for sure that stocks have hit a bottom is to read about it in a history book - not by reading “Trader” or watching Fast Money on CNBC. However, the sin isn’t calling a bottom too early or voicing an opinion. Stewart had a bone to pick with CNBC - as I’m sure the Stewarts of his day did with “Trader” - because there was so little humility in the way the opinion was being voiced and advertised. At the end of the day, “buy stocks” four days before Black Tuesday and “buy Bear Stearns” a couple of weeks before it collapses are calls that should be heeded as  just another piece of food for thought in deciding where the market might go; slogans like “In Cramer we Trust”, as if he were the god of stock-picking, go against that very important caveat.

It is also useful to point out that Stewart’s criticism of Cramer pales in comparison with what John Kenneth Galbraith had to say about “Trader” in his account of the 1929 crash:

. . . by 1929, numerous journalists were sternly resisting the more subtle blandishments and flattery to which they have been thought susceptible. Instead they were demanding cold cash for news favorable to the market. A financial columnist of the Daily News, who signed himself “The Trader,” received some $19,000 in 1929 and early 1930 from a free-lance operator named John J. Levenson. “The Trader” repeatedly spoke well of stocks in which Mr. Levenson was interested. 

Some progress was made, though. Fast-forward 58 years, and press coverage of the next big stock market debacle was much different:

 

Another noteworthy decaying newspaper was a copy of the very first edition of the Wall Street Journal: July 8, 1989: 

It is amazing how similar it looked in design until the recent face lift post-Newscorp acquisition.

The Journal’s first lead-left article? A laundry list of price movements: 

The second article from the top - ”The Market To-Day” - references a “bear party” that depressed American stocks. One of the videos at the museum explains that the terms “bull market” and “bear market”, used to describe down markets and up markets, respectively, originated from the way those two animals attack. A bear will claw down its prey, whereas a bull will strike up at its prey.

Strange but true or true but strange?

Credit Crisis

On March 25 the Museum of American Finance unveiled a new exhibit on the financial crisis: a giant timeline that organizes all the key events of the last two years into regulatory, financial, foreign policy and other buckets. It is accompanied by a brief video that sheds some analysis on the crisis’s causes and effects. 

It does a good job of objectively laying out what happened when and organizing it in a logical manner. But it doesn’t yet gel together the events into a cohesive narrative that lets you walk away with clear take-aways on what exactly is going on. I don’t think it is the museum’s fault though: perhaps it is just too early yet for us to completely understand all the dimensions of this crisis and how it will play out.

They should, however, update this exhibit - a chart of the DJIA over the years that has not yet taken the huge dive indicated on the crisis exhibit: 

This one could also use an update: a Bank of America family tree, conspicuously missing Merrill Lynch:

Other exhibits still reference Lehman Brothers as a bond trading powerhouse, etc. I’m sure these will all get corrected over time - after all, these days, if they were to wipe out defunct Wall Street names from their exhibits they might not have time for anything else.

These nips and tucks aside, if you’re ever free on a Saturday afternoon and looking for a good time, I nerdily suggest the MoAF.