De Angelis was caught when the price of soybean oil plunged and he couldn’t pay his broker. The drop was so deep it wiped out De Angelis and his broker, too. Folks who had lent money against De Angelis’s warehouse receipts looked to AmEx to pay them back. They complained AmEx should have made sure the tanks contained soybean oil and not seawater. It was a good argument. They wanted $175 million, which was more than ten times what AmEx earned in 1964. It looked like AmEx would be wiped out, too. The market cut the stock price in half. Buffett became interested when he saw the stock price fall.
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