Over the past year and a half, CBS business correspondent Anthony Mason has filed downbeat report after downbeat report for “CBS Evening News” – so negative that at in January 2008 [1]anchor Katie Couric labeled him the “grim reaper.”
But on the Oct. 28 broadcast, [2]Mason had an upbeat report: a profile of 94-year-old businessman Seth Glickenhaus, the chief investment officer and senior partner of Glickenhaus & Co., a Wall Street investment firm.
According to the report, Glickenhaus is veteran of several cataclysmic financial events in
“The pessimism was very thick at that point,” Glickenhaus said about the Great Depression. “People were nervous as hell.”
However, he stuck with it, according to Mason: “Glickenhaus has made a fortune by choosing well. As BusinessWeek reported in 1959, after making an $8 million killing, he quit the street to go to medical school.”
Glickenhaus, [3]a long-time Democratic donor, returned to Wall Street after his short-lived medical aspirations. In 1987, after the stock market crashed, he stuck with it and it paid dividends.
“In the decade after the 1987 crash, his company was the top-ranked money manager in the country with gains of more than 500 percent,” Mason said. “Now he sees opportunity again.”
Glickenhaus has applied lessons from previous crises in his approach to current conditions. While he said he wasn’t comfortable with the volatile wild swings in the financial markets, he isn’t shying away.
“But do I feel that there's going to be great monies made in the years? And how!” Glickenhaus said.
Glickenhaus told [4]the Fox Business Network on Oct. 27 the economic conditions of the Great Depression and today were very different and that’s why he remains bullish on the financial markets.