By Pater Tenebrarum of Acting Man
A Modern-Day Shoeshine Boy Moment
There is a well-known – though likely apocryphal – anecdote from the end of the roaring 20s. It involves Joseph P. Kennedy, US ambassador to the UK from the late 1930s to mid 1940s. Before he entered the civil service and politics, he had made a name (and a fortune) for himself as a businessman and investor. On Wall Street he inter alia ran the Libby-Owens-Ford stock pool with a number of Irishmen, a loose association of investors pooling their resources and dedicated to manipulating the hell out of Libby-Owens-Ford stock by deftly using insider information to their advantage.
Today he would be deemed a criminal, but at the time his activities on the stock exchange were perfectly legal and he was widely admired for being a wily operator. Rightly so, we should add.
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