Cassius:
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
We've looked at J.P. Morgan's fortune teller a few times, links below, here's another big-money advisor.
From Untapped New York, February 23, 2024:
Discover the little known story of Cornelius Vanderbilt's Fortune Teller, the influence she had on his life... and the scandalous legal battle that ensued!
In his opening statement over the dispute of railroad tycoon “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt’s will, attorney Scott Lord proclaimed that Vanderbilt was “a believer in spiritualism” and “clairvoyance and was governed by its revelations.” Lord argued that these beliefs, among other “impairments,” rendered Vanderbilt susceptible to undue influence towards the end of his life while drafting his will. The will allocated the majority of Vanderbilt’s massive fortune to his eldest son, William Henry Vanderbilt, with comparatively modest sums going to the rest of the heirs. The claims of supernatural intervention brought the name of a well-known 19th-century fortune teller, Madame Morrow, into the contentious court battle between William and his siblings.
Madame Morrow began advertising her psychic services in local New York City newspapers in the winter of 1854. An 1876 advertisement from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle declares that she “will tell of past, present and future, describes absent friends, lost property, and treats diseases of every nature.”
She dispensed her otherworldly knowledge from a handful of different locations throughout her life. Madame Morrow lived at 76 Broome Street, 46 Norfolk Street, 184 Ludlow Street, and 808 Myrtle Ave in Brooklyn, among other addresses. We know about some of these locations thanks to her arrest records.
An 1819 New York State statute outlawed the practice of fortune-telling, a practice that remains illegal to this day. This law put Madame Morrow and many other working-class women who shared her trade under constant threat of arrest. Records show that authorities arrested Morrow a handful of times in both New York and Philadelphia. However, these encounters with the law never deterred her. Newspaper advertisements for her special powers quickly followed sensationalized reports of her arrests.
Morrow had little choice but to continue in her work. While she reported that her income was from dressmaking, fortune-telling provided much more money than dressmaking ever could. Women of the 19th century had very few options to pursue in order to financially support themselves, and fortune-telling, despite its risks, was appealing.
Madame Morrow was well known for her psychic abilities, especially among the young ladies of New York City who sought to find out who they would marry. Morrow must have made an exception in seeing Vanderbilt, as she typically didn’t allow men into her salon. In Mortimer and The Witches, Carter relates the story of how Thomson dressed up in women’s clothing to sit for a reading.
At the Vanderbilt court proceedings, multiple witnesses took the stand to describe conversations with the Commodore about spiritualism, mediumship, and fortune-telling. In October 1878, Helen C. Stille took the stand and told the rapt audience how she accompanied Vanderbilt on a visit to Madame Morrow’s. Vanderbilt told Stille that Morrow “had told him strange things and she was a wonderful woman,” as reported by The New-York Tribune....
....MUCH MORE
In a vein similar to fortune tellers being outlawed while financial advisors roam free, side bets like credit default swaps purchased by speculators who don't own the underlying debt are not all that different from illegal bucket shops, which take the side of the bet opposite their customer's while tossing the trade ticket in the bucket and never actually buying or selling the underlying security. If interested see some of the links in this July 2020 post, including:
November 2011
Are Derivatives Contracts Nothing More than Unenforceable Gambling Debts?
...Here's the U.S, Senate testimony of Eric Dinallo, then-Superintendent of
the New York State Insurance Department on October 14, 2008 (8 page PDF).
...I have argued that these naked credit default swaps should not be called swaps becausethere is no transfer or swap of risk. Instead, risk is created by the transaction. Indeed, youhave no risk on the outcome of the day’s third race at Belmont until you place a bet onhorse number five to win....
"Fortune tellers, astrologers and economists"
One of the great salespeople of all time, Evangeline Adams, is batting leadoff.
From The Enlightened Economist:
Fortune Tellers by Walter Friedman is a provocative title for a book about economic forecasters – or perhaps not. For many people would agree about the resemblance between the two activities. Besides, this is the tale of the early forecasters who preceded or perhaps more charitably laid the foundations for the model-based, computerised macroeconomic forecasting of our own times.
The first character to stride onto the stage is literally a fortune teller. Evangeline Adams was an astrologer who offered stock market tips and predicted business trends for affluent New Yorkers in the early 20th century. Her enormous influence was cemented by the claim to have correctly forecast the 1929 stock market crash. Friedman writes: “Even in her own time, many regarded Evangeline Adams as a fraud and a scam artist. Her success, however, points to a profound anxiety about the future. Capitalism, after all, is a uniquely future-oriented economic system.” The other characters range from the more respectable Roger Babson, whose forecasts prefigured technical analysis, based on charts and trends, to the highly respectable Irving Fisher, who based his forecasts on theory and models, and John Moody, who collected masses of detailed data and analysed the figures, founding what would become the famous ratings agency.We've visited with Evangeline a few times:
The book is a great read, based as it is around the personalities of these early forecasters. A surprising number were sufferers from tuberculosis – it is hard to resist the amateur psychology of speculating that they particularly wanted to foresee the future, living as they did in the shadow of mortality. They were inventive and entrepreneurial. Babson (who founded Wellesley College) built the world’s largest relief map of the United States. Fisher patented a precursor to the Rolodex and invented a prize-winning tent to aid the treatment of tuberculosis. He also built a machine showing the circular flow of income in the economy, well before the famous Phillips Machine...MORE
UPDATED--Are You a Recent Graduate Who Hasn't Found a Job? Consider Becoming a Charlatan
Update: "Follow-up: Choosing the Charlatan Career Path".
Original post:
A field of human endeavor we have studied [some would say participated in -ed] for many years, links after the jump.
From the Stumbling and Mumbling blog:
The strong demand for charlatans
...One of my favorite examples comes from a "American Experience" episode, "The crash of 1929"See also:
(we linked to it in reference to Joe Kennedy's pool manipulation of RCA)*
1929 February: Astrologer Evangeline Adams, who counts Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and J. P. Morgan among her clients, predicts the market will rise in the coming months.
This is contradicted by her comment:
"In 1928 and 1929... it behooves everyone to be extremely cautious in investment and money matters, and be prepared for this threatening configuration of planets". The stock market crash occurred in October of 1929.Or it may just be an earlier version of the Cramer technique.
Ms. Adams was reputed to call the crash later that year based on the horoscope of Mr. Morgan's son Henry Sturgis (founder of Morgan Stanley).... "S.E.C. Charges Psychic With Securities Fraud"
Should have seen it coming....
Our Favorite Astrologer is Predicting a Market Crash
"Fake Astrology-Based Hedge Fund Threatens To Ruin Things For All The Legit Astrology-Based Hedge Funds Out There "
And in the crash of 2008 the top newsletter writer was Arch Crawford: "Investing: "Throwing Out the Rule Book" (The best Performing Investment Letter is by an Astrologer)"
