Even the usually bearish Alexander Dana Noyes of the New York Times was skeptical of the forecast of a market collapse. It is “not perhaps surprising that the idea of an utterly disastrous and paralyzing crash . . . should have found few believers,” he wrote; after all, in contrast to previous episodes, the country now has “the power and protective resources of the Federal Reserve,” while the market was “guarded against the convulsions of old-time panics . . . by the country’s accumulation of gold.” Previous crashes had all been preceded by an extraneous shock of some sort, which broke the
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