Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms

Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms PDF Author: Chris Armstrong
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442633042
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms describes the evolution of the securities market in Canada, from the onset of trading, through the boom of the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s, to the outbreak of the Second World War. The book documents the problems of fraud, misrepresentation, and manipulation of prices, which plagued the securities industry from the outset and which eventually led to market regulation, first by the stock exchanges and later, after the First World War, by governments. Some people argued that regulation to prevent abuses should be modelled on the American ‘blue sky’ legislation, so named after the promises of smooth-talking con men in fly-by-night operations who victimized the unwary with sales pitches offering shares in virtually anything. Even ‘the blue sky above.’ Such legislation became necessary as shady types marketed shares of doubtful value through ‘boiler rooms,’ which used high-pressure mail and telephone selling methods to separate people from their money. This is a tale well told, with a splendid cast of crooks and raffish characters. It is also an in-depth study based on extensive primary research that captures the distinctiveness of the development of the Canadian securities market. Armstrong’s book shows that today’s Bre-X saga is only the latest in a series of episodes in which investors have fixed their hopes for quick and easy profits on speculative mining stock. It will be welcomed by students and scholars of financial, business, and economic history.

Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms

Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms PDF Author: Chris Armstrong
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442633042
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book

Book Description
Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms describes the evolution of the securities market in Canada, from the onset of trading, through the boom of the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s, to the outbreak of the Second World War. The book documents the problems of fraud, misrepresentation, and manipulation of prices, which plagued the securities industry from the outset and which eventually led to market regulation, first by the stock exchanges and later, after the First World War, by governments. Some people argued that regulation to prevent abuses should be modelled on the American ‘blue sky’ legislation, so named after the promises of smooth-talking con men in fly-by-night operations who victimized the unwary with sales pitches offering shares in virtually anything. Even ‘the blue sky above.’ Such legislation became necessary as shady types marketed shares of doubtful value through ‘boiler rooms,’ which used high-pressure mail and telephone selling methods to separate people from their money. This is a tale well told, with a splendid cast of crooks and raffish characters. It is also an in-depth study based on extensive primary research that captures the distinctiveness of the development of the Canadian securities market. Armstrong’s book shows that today’s Bre-X saga is only the latest in a series of episodes in which investors have fixed their hopes for quick and easy profits on speculative mining stock. It will be welcomed by students and scholars of financial, business, and economic history.

Big Men Fear Me

Big Men Fear Me PDF Author: Mark Bourrie
Publisher: Biblioasis
ISBN: 1771964944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
Nominated for the 2023 Heritage Toronto Book Award • Finalist for the 2023 Ottawa Book Award in English Nonfiction • Longlisted for the 2023 National Business Book Award The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America's most influential media moguls. When George McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire and merged them into the Globe and Mail, the charismatic 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market. It was just the beginning of the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day be prime minister of Canada. But the charismatic McCullagh had a dark side. Dogged by the bipolar disorder that destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him, he was all but written out of history. It was a loss so significant that journalist Robert Fulford has called McCullagh’s biography "one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history"—until now. In Big Men Fear Me, award-winning historian Mark Bourrie tells the remarkable story of McCullagh’s inspirational rise and devastating fall, and with it sheds new light on the resurgence of populist politics, challenges to collective action, and attacks on the free press that characterize our own tumultuous era.

Dictionary of Financial Terms

Dictionary of Financial Terms PDF Author: Virginia B. Morris
Publisher: Lightbulb Press, Inc.
ISBN: 1933569042
Category : Economcis
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Streamlined, straightforward, and simple to read guides from Standard & Poor's and Lightbulb Press. The easiest way to get a grip on personal finance, investing, and retirement From the world's leading financial analysts and investor education specialists comes an invaluable foundation of knowledge for every kind of investment you want to make. These guides, a collaboration between Standard & Poor's and Lightbulb Press, use clear language and informative graphics to demystify financial topics. The books make it easy for you to navigate the financial markets and understand the basics of investing and personal finance. Filled with clear, jargon-free definitions of important financial terms, this handy reference gives you the language you need to navigate the world of investing and finance. It also includes common acronyms and extended definitions of more sophisticated investing concepts.

Swindler

Swindler PDF Author: Leslie Y. Dawson
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1039118402
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Insurance salesman. Farm hand. Bay Street elite. Writer. Grandfather. International criminal. A.E. Dawson was all these things--and more. Part family memoir, part criminal history and part adventure story, Swindler journeys from the bucolic English countryside to Toronto’s high society and a fetid Mexican jail. All the while it asks: what leads a decent man to crime? Leslie Dawson knew her grandfather had run afoul of the law, but it wasn’t until she researched deep family secrets that she learned the true extent of his crimes. A.E. Dawson was one of the first Canadians to be convicted both in the United States and Canada of stock fraud on a grand scale. This type of fraud was so prominent in Toronto during the mid-twentieth century that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dubbed it "The Canadian Problem." Swindler tells the story of how a cultured, accomplished man got caught up in the great Canadian pastime of mining stock fraud. Leslie Dawson weaves together her personal journey of discovery with well-researched historical context. She includes passages written by A.E. Dawson himself in this touching portrait of a talented yet much-flawed man.

My Life in Crime and Other Academic Adventures

My Life in Crime and Other Academic Adventures PDF Author: Martin L. Friedland
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442629789
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
Since his call to the Bar in 1960, Martin L. Friedland has been involved in a number of important public policy issues, including bail, legal aid, gun control, securities regulation, access to the law, judicial independence and accountability, and national security. My Life in Crime and other Academic Adventures offers a first-hand account of the development of these areas of law from the perspective of a man who was heavily involved in their formation and implementation. It is also the story of a distinguished academic, author, and former dean of law at the University of Toronto. Moving beyond the boundaries of conventional memoir, Friedland offers an extended meditation on public policy issues and significant events in the field of law, discussing their historical impact and predicting the course of their future development. Given his personal experience, there is no other person more suited to discuss these hugely important issues. Friedland puts the law and legal institutions into a wider context, looking at the role of personalities, politics, and pressure groups in the establishment of laws that continue to have tremendous importance for Canadians. My Life in Crime and other Academic Adventures reflects upon a life devoted to education, scholarship, and the law, and is an insider account of public policy issues that have come to shape life in this country in the twentieth century and beyond.

The Kansas Blue Sky Act of 1911

The Kansas Blue Sky Act of 1911 PDF Author: David Ress
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031438310
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
This Palgrave Pivot presents the first in-depth study of the pioneering Kansas Blue Sky Act of 1911, the first effort in American financial history to regulate the sale of securities in the US. Though offering a balanced examination of critiques of the legislation as a barrier to individual liberty, interstate commerce, and economic growth, the author challenges the prevailing view of the Kansas Act as a complete anomaly, instead exploring sensitively what ‘blue sky laws’ can tell us about small-town market values during the nineteenth-century. Drawing on contemporary accounts of rural commerce and popular stereotypes about rural society, the author takes a cultural-historical approach to the politics of regulation and government intervention in the economy. Situating the Blue Sky Act in the broader context of Progressive Era reforms, the author demonstrates how distinctive patterns of commerce and finance in the self-contained, miniature economies of mid-continental rural communities were often at odds with the “caveat emptor” (buyer beware) standard of American law and commerce in larger markets. Instead the author explores how paternalistic assumptions about individual investment decisions led to the creation of the Act, yet how it was doomed to failure in the context of emerging national stock markets, changing attitudes that regarded stock primarily as a vehicle for trade and the market boom of the 1920s. The book also explores how the initial acceptance of the Kansas model in other states and its later rejection provides a lens through which to examine the fluidity of notions of individual liberty during this period of fast economic and social change. This book will be of interest to researchers working in American financial history, as well as legal history and securities law.

Moose Pastures and Mergers

Moose Pastures and Mergers PDF Author: Chris Armstrong
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442657782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Long before the spectacular collapse of Bre-X in 1997, the Canadian capital markets had their share of swindlers and crooks. In the boom times after Second World War, hard-sell speculative mining ventures, pushing what often amounted to a few acres of moose pasture, riddled over-the-counter markets and the TSE. It was in this context that the Ontario Securities Commission developed into Canada's leading securities regulator. Following the war, the OSC concerned itself primarily with fraudsters and attempts to reign in Toronto's boiler rooms, but by the mid-sixties increasingly sophisticated markets and a series of scandals culminating in the Windfall affair resulted in a rewriting of the Securities Act and a widening of the OSC's investor protection mandate. The seventies tested the Commission's new powers as increased corporate merger activity brought the phrase "insider-trading" into the popular lexicon. Surprisingly, considering that capital markets have such a profound impact on Canada's well-being, this is the first thorough study of the their post-war evolution and regulation. Moose Pastures and Mergers takes off where the author's acclaimed previous work, Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms: Buying and Selling Securities in Canada, 1870–1940, left off. With an ear for a good story – seedy personalities, bunglers and guileless victims abound – and a scholar's rigour, Armstrong has met the protean beast of share markets head on and revealed its shape for the timid or the merely baffled. Essential reading for business journalists, securities lawyers, academics, and interested investors. Winner of the J.J. Talman Award presented by the Ontario Historical Society

The Thousandth Man

The Thousandth Man PDF Author: Barry Cahill
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442657952
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
James McGregor Stewart (1889-1955) was perhaps the foremost Canadian corporate lawyer of his day. He was also an appellate counsel, venture capitalist, Conservative Party fundraiser, bibliographer of Rudyard Kipling, and sometime university teacher of classics. A leader of the bar in the inter-war period, he was the first Maritimer to serve as president of the Canadian Bar Association. He distinguished himself mainly in constitutional cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. During his career, Stewart was also head of the leading law firm in eastern Canada (now Stewart McKelvey Stirling Scales), director and vice-president of the Royal Bank of Canada, and senior counsel to the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations. Above all, Stewart was committed to the idea of law as a truly learned profession and to the bar as the most important legal institution. To this day, no lawyer has held such prestige and power both within and outside Atlantic Canada; in his time he was the only Maritime lawyer who gained full acceptance by every branch of the Canadian establishment. Thematic rather that chronological in approach, this fascinating legal biography provides both a history of a uniquely Canadian career and an interpretation of its significance for Stewart's time and ours.

Private Escape: Sometimes I Think!

Private Escape: Sometimes I Think! PDF Author: Christopher Duke
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
ISBN: 1649792581
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
This collection of poetic themes, philosophy, and personal thoughts is provocatively written to excite the reader’s mind. Duke’s journey into the realms of spiritual redemption and to establish a footing in the truths of reality will stimulate your mind. The romantic ensemble is tasteful and pushes the envelope of erotica, while the prisoner’s pastime section is both sad and rewarding. Written during the first six months of the pandemic, it is emotional and thrilling.

Dream Car

Dream Car PDF Author: Dimitry Anastakis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487555857
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 583

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Book Description
Dream Car tells the story of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s fantastical 1970s-era Safety Vehicle-1 (SV1), audaciously launched during a tumultuous breakpoint in postwar history. The tale of the sexy-yet-safe SV1 reveals the influence of automobiles on ideas about the future, technology, entrepreneurship, risk, safety, showmanship, politics, sex, gender, business, and the state, as well as the history of the auto industry’s birth, decline, and rebirth. Written as an “open road,” the book invites readers to travel a narrative arc that unfolds chronologically and thematically. Dream Car’s seven chapters have been structured so that they can be read in any order, determined by whichever theme each reader finds most interesting. The book also includes a musical playlist of car songs from the era and songs about the SV1 itself.