speculation
Public outcry over speculation has had an important political impact in several periods of U.S. history. During the progressive era in the late 19th and early 20th cent., speculation on Wall Street helped reformers led to landmark legislation regulating big business. Following the crash of 1929, which was widely blamed on the speculative abuses of the 1920s, the Roosevelt administration passed legislation regulating Wall Street and the banking industry. In the 1980s and early 1990s, critics attacked junk bonds, corporate mergers, and the savings and loan industry as examples of speculative abuses that reduced America's economic competitiveness. In the late 1990s speculation was most evident in the enormously high market value attained by some Internet and computer company stocks and in the on-line day trading of stocks.
See also banking; margin requirement; panic.
See R. Sobel, Panic on Wall Street (1968); M. Mayer, Markets (1988); C. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes (1989); E. Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost (1999); G. J. Millman, The Day Traders (1999); C. R. Morris, Money, Greed, and Risk (1999); R. J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (2000).
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