U.S. Business: Wall Street: A Long Look Upward

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No Panic. In times past, such reverses could have set off panic afflicting the nation's entire economy. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the 1966 market is that even the small-time stock buyer, though uneasy, has refused to panic. Instead, he is playing the game with considerable cool. Says a Milwaukee schoolteacher: "Most of the people I know who invest have job security. We're only losing profits now. I'm not going to chicken out." Says Boston Physician Dennis Slone: "When I look around and see the demands of the people for goods, I feel there is nothing to worry about. Anyone who drops out of the market now is making a real mistake." Says St. Louis Chemicals Executive Brooks Bernhardt, 51: "My wife and I own 14 common stocks, plus shares in a mutual fund. We've put these away for our retirement. Recently, they've all gone down a little bit, but whether the market goes up or down in four months or two years doesn't make that much difference to us." In Cincinnati, Kenyon Z. Mitchell, 78, a retired railroad electrician, says almost proudly: "I'm not buying now because I want buying power for when the time comes. I've had some tremendous profits over the years. I've had some losses. Nobody has plusses all the time." And in Boston, Housewife Cici Philbin, 25, the daughter of a stockbroker, senses opportunity in the slide. Says she: "It's a good time to pick up G.M."

Such sentiments fly in the face of any 1966 doomsayers (or, in the old Wall Street word, bears) who in their most nervous moments may conjure up images of 1929, when stock values almost overnight plummeted by 50%. To talk about 1966 in 1929 phrases is to compare Gemini 10 to the tin lizzie. At the time of the Crash, a mere 1,371,920 people were, as the saying went, "playing the market." Most of these were either professional speculators or amateur gamblers who might have done better at the $2 window at the nearest race track. Today, corporate ownership through shareholding is the warp and woof of American life. Some 20,120,000 people (more than half of them women) own stocks in their own right. Another 3,600,000 participate in the market through shares in mutual funds, which themselves own $35 billion worth of common stocks. Millions more are linked to the stock market by company profit-sharing and corporate pension plans; pension funds alone have $39 billion, or 55% of the present market value of their assets, invested in common stocks.

The national spread of shareholding is such that the system itself has been dubbed "people's capitalism." It is fitting indeed that that title was invented by the Wall Street-based brokerage house that is most responsible for selling common stocks to the common man. Its corporate title is already part of American folklore: Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith.