Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? by Charles Raw, Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson Read Free Book Online

tolerantly, but bluntly, as 'a manipulator'.
        Cornfeld graduated in 1950 with a ba in psychology, but without any clear purpose in which to deploy his growing ability to command and manipulate. One might take him for the material of which politicians are made: but for all the radical coloration he had absorbed from his background, there is no evidence that he possessed even that spark of obsession with political ideas which is usually to be found in the most mechanical of party professionals. He did toy briefly with a vision of himself in the slightly similar role of union leader.
        After graduating from Brooklyn, Cornfeld made several more trips as a purser, chiefly on the European run. It is hard to believe that Cornfeld saw himself spending a lifetime as an ocean-going book-keeper. But the idea of organizing his fellow pursers into a union was more in his line, and he got as far as obtaining an introduction to Paul Hall, boss of the Maritime Union, and discussing tactics.
        Comfeld's union of pursers was never organized. He was, however, right to think that he was cut out for some considerable career. Inheritance had provided him with an actor's ear and sensitivity to mood. His upbringing had accustomed him to predominance. One might wish to be sceptical about some of Alfred Adler's claims, but it must be said that the thesis of organ inferiority and compensation seems remarkably suggestive when applied to the case of his student Bernard Cornfeld.
        Cornfeld's education and environment had provided him with the jargon, and some of the mechanism, of psychological analysis, and with the exciting rhetoric of equality and social reform. His capacity to use such tools had been refined by vigorous experiences in dialectic and manoeuvre.
        And at least one 'goal' was beginning to come into focus even before the end of Cornfeld's Brooklyn period. Bill Kolins studied English literature at Brooklyn at the time that Cornfeld studied psychology, and they shared some classes. 'Bernie's ambition,' he says, 'was always to make a very great deal of money.' Kolins is quite sure of this, because it was a most unusual ambition for a Brooklyn student to have - or at least to admit -in those days.
        Cornfeld would not have to wait long for an opportunity to match his talents to his ambitions. Financial revolution was brewing, and he was an early recruit to the cadres.
        
Chapter Three
        
The Financial Revolutionaries
        
         The rise of the mutual fund idea, and Bernard Cornfeld's early days, both as social worker and fund salesman. In which a young lawyer named Edward Cowett also learns about mutual funds.
        Walter and Ruth Benedick were active members of the Three Arrows community. Walter Benedick arrived in America in 1932, from a tiny town in south Germany, and worked for the First Investors Corporation throughout the Depression.
        Towards the end of 1952 Benedick was approached by a member of the New York Stock Exchange named John Kalk, with the suggestion that they might start a mutual fund business together. In June of the following year, they established the Investors Planning Corporation, with a capital of $320,000. ‘I feel sick whenever I think about the shoestring we started on,' says Benedick in recollection. And indeed, the organization was to experience an awkward infancy. But ipc could not easily have been a total failure, for it had behind it the power of an idea whose time had very definitely come.
        Over the next decade and a half, open-ended investment companies were to alter the financial landscape even in countries so un-American as not to call them mutual funds. But at first the mutual fund revolution was confined to the United States, and ipc was launched remarkably near to the actual moment of take-off. At the start of 1953, exactly six months before ipc began operations, there were about four billion dollars in mutual funds