Among them was National Student Marketing Corporation, the creation of 30‐year‐old Cortes Wesley Randell of Washington.
It was a time which bred financial wizards with style-James Joseph Ling, the Dallas electrical contractor who concocted Ling‐Temco‐Vaught Gerald Tsai, the proper Chinese from Boston, who created the Manhattan Fund Saul Philip Steinberg, a Long Island boy who nearly succeeded in using the computer‐rental firm he had started with $25,000 capital to take over New York's $9‐billion Chemical Bank and of course Bernard Cornfeld, one‐time Socialist from Brooklyn College, who caused global tremors with his Investors Overseas Service. It was a heyday for new ploys or old ploys in new guises, conglomerates, mutual funds, hedge funds, growth stocks. Wall Streeters called the style of stock market operation that flourished in the sixties “go ‐ go.” It was a style free, fast and lively, full of merriment and the kind of selfcongratulatory joy that comes with overnight riches a style characterized by rapid in‐and‐out trading of huge blocks of stock, with an eye to quick and ever larger profits. The loss of perspective by accountants well symbolizes one of the maddest periods in Wall Street history. In the late 1960's, John Brooks writes in “The Go‐Go Years,” “ management kept pressing the accountants mesmerizing them with new and exciting subtleties” the accountants responded by starting to think of themselves as members of “the corporate team,” bending the rules to suit those subtleties, “thinking legalistically rather than conscientiously,” discussing the “creative” aspects of their jobs in staid professional journals. It's dull because the job of accountants is to hew to the rules when everybody else is ready to junk those rules as just so many obstacles to a more novel and exciting future.
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