[By a happy coincidence, the nobility's POV on this book appears today in the NY Times, where Tina squeeze Sir Harold Evans appears as reviewer. Evans' reference to Americans' stuporous reaction to the recent stock market collapse appears below. To me this sounds like Peter Drucker's wooly-headed notions about "pension fund socialism" ruling the US.]
... The popular mood pictured in ''Every Man a Speculator'' is volatile. It swings from loathing in the bad years to irrational exuberance in the good. Mostly, it seems to have been one of irritable ambivalence. But Fraser, also the author of ''Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor,'' has a keen grasp of his material, and his vivacious style and historical perspective carry us through the tumults. Rather surprisingly, at the end he suggests that today ''most of the hoary suspicions'' have faded away. He concludes that back home in living rooms all across America, where culture wars are ultimately settled, popular hostility to the Street has been revised ''even in the teeth of the most stunning Wall Street frauds since the crash of 1929.''
His explanation for this, and for Democratic rhetoric no longer demonizing the Street, is the explosion of institutional investing through pension funds and mutual funds. The largest pension funds own 60 percent of the largest corporations. For the first time roughly half of the population participates in the stock market, up from 10 percent in 1960. Only a minority may be involved actively, but Fraser considers their mortgages and college anxieties and dreams to be intertwined directly and intimately with Wall Street in a way not seen before. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/books/review/13EVANS.html?pagewanted=print&position=>
Carl