Old Timer Says Pipelines and Ships Are The Way To Go

Lately people have come into the cafe looking for our copy of the Wall Street Journal. They seem to want to read it more than ever, with the tough times that everyone is talking about on Wall St. Today I found a story about a man who remembers the 1929 Crash, who worked on Wall St. during the depression. His name is Seth Glickenhaus, and he’s more worried about the future of business than the stock market.

He told E.S. Browning “We’ve gotten soft in the United States, politically, economically and in every way. We’ve had so much prosperity that we can’t compete any more. Those days are gone, except in small companies. In things like autos–those days are gone. He was once a big investor in Chrysler, so I’m sure he’s lost a bundle.

The big difference Glickenhaus sees between 1929 and today is that back then, Hoover and the treasury secretary Andrew Mellon did the opposite of what Hank Paulson and Bush did. “They believed it wasn’t the role of government to get involved. This time the government is moving heaven and earth to reverse the cycle.”

Glickenhaus is now 94 years old, and still makes the commute from New Rochelle to his Manhattan office. He said that more and more people are seeking him out, since his experience goes back so far, all the way to the market’s near apocalypse. Nowadays, he likes pipeline and energy stocks, and dry bulk carriers, the ships that bring ore, wheat cement and other necessities to China. “I am more pessimistic about business than about the stock market,” he said.