Shares are now owned by millions of ordinary people worldwide.
By 1956, 37 million families owned automobiles a rise of 61 per cent in eight years. By 1956, 37 million married couples were living in their own households?an increase of 28 per cent over the total of ten years before. The $5,000-a-year income, that mystical dividing line between scraping and comfort, had been achieved by 23 million families or individuals a jump of 153 per cent in ten years.
Inflation, subtle and invisible, had also set in and had begun to erode the value of a dollar. Yet it was not the catastrophic, runaway inflation of Germany in the Twenties, but a benign, "creeping" inflation the kind of mild stomach distress that accompanies rich living. Prices have risen inexorably. The generation of war babies is growing up in a world of $5,000 cars, $30,000 houses, $8 theater tickets, $5 books, 28-cent milk, and $85 suits. A nickel buys almost nothing. Even the candy bar has jumped 20 per cent to six cents?and a mighty small candy bar it is, too.
The end is not yet. The Sixties are here, and it may be it could be that the shooting pains of inflation will be diagnosed as ulcerous. But for the present, the vigor of the economy seems generally to be overcoming the drags and resistances.
People have not only been spending more, but saving more. "Discretionary income," that pleasant bulge over and beyond the budget for necessities, is at the command of most families. Consumer credit, which in the past has expanded dangerously beyond people's ability to pay, has reached astronomic heights with an astonishingly low percentage of defaults.
The enormous and unremitting flow of dollars into the market place has returned unexampled profits to industry. Corporations have assiduously strengthened their underpinning, invested hugely in research, laid away cash surpluses, and still distributed the highest dividend totals in history.
The combination of these forces and these events and of many others, as well?has been faithfully noted by the stock market. It has surged upward strongly, scaling peaks like a mountain goat, past the frayed rope ends and broken ice axes marking the high point of 1929, and into the rarefied atmosphere beyond. As noted, about 12,500,000 people are making the trip.
Who are these people and what do they want? They are, for the most part, plain old American citizens who want a piece of the American future. They work, they earn, they put something by, and they believe they know a solid, reasonably safe, capitalistic investment when they see one. For nearly fifteen years, American business has been doing handsomely, as anyone with half an eye can tell. It's a meager little town that hasn't acquired an assembly plant, a parts depot, a retail outlet, a branch sales office, or some other piece of one industrial complex or another in the past decade. There is a fine glow of prosperity about these places, and if you can't see it, your local friends who work there will be happy to tell you about it.
What doesn't pop up under one's nose is in the air. Never has industry seemed so glamorous. This is not to say that strikes and unemployment and other stubborn problems of the capitalistic pattern have been eliminated, but that there is a new gloss and glitter to industry's ability to perform and produce. The accelerated technology of the postwar period has plunged stodgy old business into the frontiers of the universe. Missiles, rockets, electronic miracles of a thousand kinds are now meat-and-potatoes business not only for established giants like General Electric but for fresh young sprouts like Texas Instruments, Tracerlab, Ampex, Polaroid, and many other fast-growing corporations.
Ordinarily, such excitement would be noted almost exclusively by business and financial publications, except for the occasional rocket whose manufacturer's name makes the front page of the paper. But through television, industry is now in every home. Not alone to sell foods, drugs, cosmetics, cigarettes, and appliances; radio had and has plenty to say about these, too. But to sell industry itself its resourcefulness, its inventiveness, its enormous concern with creature comforts and with national welfare. With tremendous visual impact, the institutional commercials of Westinghouse, U.S. Steel, duPont, Alcoa, and the rest are telling the success story of American business for all to hear.
Two prime requisites of an active stock market are hereby established. Across the country, people with "discretionary income" are becoming acquainted with the sweet smell of corporate success. There are buyers and something to buy they can easily buys shares or unit trusts and a lot of people are also investing on Forex.
As computers became more intelligent they can predict future price movements and take a lot of the risk out of Forex trading.
Soon Forex trading could be just as prevalent as owning stocks and shares.
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