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

throughout America. Within five years, that figure more than trebled, passing thirteen billion dollars at the end of 1958 - and everything that happened in the Fifties, was, it turned out, mere curtain raising for the Sixties. It was thought
        remarkable in 1955 when, for the first time, the public put a billion dollars into the mutual funds in a single year. But ten years after that the mutual funds received, in one year, five billion dollars to be channelled into investments. As this was comfortably more than twice the value of the new stock which America's corporations made available for investment that year, some people became uneasy about the progress of the revolution. The majority of professionals in the investment business, however, merely admired the very large increases in stock exchange prices.
        In the latter years of the Sixties, some very hard questions were asked about the mutual fund concept. But at the start of the boom, the mood of the business was evangelical. Everybody involved was convinced that the benefits of capitalism were at last being brought to ordinary folk. It had always seemed the most convincing claim against capitalism that the ownership of industrial wealth should be concentrated in the hands of the few: who could deny that spreading ownership more widely must be a noble, as well as a rewarding task? Again, it had always seemed inexcusable that the money of the rich, deployed with skill and security, should multiply rapidly, while the small surpluses of the un-rich should gather slow increments in savings banks, or dwindle in mattresses. The mechanism of the open-ended fund appears at first glance to abolish these inequities. It was entirely possible in the early Fifties to regard the mutual fund as a promising engine of social justice. It was for this reason that stalwarts of the Three Arrows community, like Walter and Ruth Benedick, should find the idea an acceptable and exciting one, and also find that many of their salesmen - and customers - should be drawn from among the socialist and liberal connections of the Three Arrows. 'If we couldn't sell them a programme, we recruited them,' said Richard Roberts, an early ipc salesman and a veteran of the Yipsels and the Three Arrows. And it also meant that the concept was ideally suited to the talents and interests of Bernard Cornfeld, a young man of identical background.
        Every Sunday, ipc placed a 'Help Wanted' advertisement in the New York Times, and this usually brought sixty or more aspirant salesmen around to the office on Monday morning. Walter Benedick would pack them into a lecture room and give them an introductory dissertation on mutual funds, which carried an invitation to come back for a two-week training course. Usually, something like half of them would return for the course - and soon the intake began to speed up. Nine months after starting operations ipc had a sales force of nearly 1,500 people, with Walter looking after the recruitment and training and Ruth handling the administration.
        One of the first stars of the sales force was Gabriel ('Gabe') Gladstone, who was equally celebrated for the volume of his sales and the flamboyance of his character. 'Gabe was a real scatterbrain,' said Walter Benedick. Richard Roberts recalled that Gabe used to visit a psychiatrist - which seemed very impressive to young men like Roberts in the Fifties. Towards the end of 1953, Gladstone introduced a friend of his from Brooklyn College and Three Arrow days: a quiet-spoken young man named Bernard Cornfeld. The Benedicks had not met him before, although Walter seemed to remember the name as having belonged to a group from the Socialist League for Industrial Democracy which spent time at the camp. Benedick agreed to see Gabe's recruit in a private session, rather than the regular Monday lecture.
        'Bernie had never had anything to do with mutual funds before,' recalls Walter Benedick. 'He seemed a bit reluctant