The stock market does queer things to people; and this sort of psychology is one of its inexplicable effects on the human mind. Imagine for instance, the absurdity of a doctor, or a lawyer, or a business man refusing to collect his accounts in order to escape paying taxes on the profits! And yet any number of men, shrewd in their own business or professions, refused to take stock market profits on account of the tax. The experience of my friend with the fifty-three thousand shares was typical of what happens to those who become afflicted with this peculiar logic. Early in November he was forced to drop half his holdings, and on November 13th he awoke from his dream to find that his brokers had closed out his account, leaving him nearly $15,000 in their debt, and without a dollar to pay it. However, he had the satisfaction of escaping the government tax. Among the curious aftermaths of the 1929 crash, was a profusion of printed articles by well known “financial experts,” each one searching vainly to find some explanation of what caused the great cataclysm. Some laid it onto President Hoover, some fixed the responsibility on the Federal Reserve Board, while others attributed it to one cause and another; but no one seems to have guessed that it was the distorted psychology of the traders themselves that brought about their own ruin. Since nobody likes to be told that he’s wrong, perhaps those who lost their money found some consolation in reading authoritative opinions that the blame was chargeable to some one other than themselves. One eminent economist has lately written many pages of more or less convincing argument to prove that the liquidation started in London, Paris and Berlin--as if it made any real difference where or how it started. The survivors of a storm-swept area (also the speculators) are more concerned with what happened than they are with how the storm began or where it came from.