1920 – Alexander Noyes joins The New York Times as financial editor. Throughout the decade, he will be the main business journalist warning about a stock market correction.
Writing in the New York Times’ special features section of Nov. 15, 1925 , financial editor Alexander D. Noyes commented:
“During the last quarter century, there have been only four of what Wall Street calls its ‘major bull movements’ and what the general public calls a speculative mania. Frequently a movement of the kind in this period, with speculation rising to huge proportions, would be interrupted by violent downward reaction, after which the speculation would be renewed on an even more extensive scale.”
Noyes would constantly worry about the overheated stock market for the next four years, and his writing would run counter to most of the other coverage in New York newspapers.
As in the 1990s, when some business journalists cautioned about the overpriced market, such warnings were ignored by the investing public and drowned out by the overwhelming volume of other stories promoting the market.
After 1924, when the market began a five-year period of upward trajectory, the newspapers were noticeably bullish along with most of the rest of Wall Street. In 1928, when Congress was examining the practice of brokerage firms lending money to clients to borrow stock, the Wall Street Journal criticized the meddling, noting that, “They talk of a ‘pyramid’ of speculations, forgetting that the pyramid is the most stable form of all building with the broadest possible base…Nothing can be so easily liquidated in this country as the speculative position in stocks.”
Noyes, meanwhile, was portraying a different viewpoint about the market. He had joined the Times in 1920 after 30 years as the financial editor of the New York Evening Post, and his experience in following the market during previous bubbles such as 1901 was invaluable. According to Klein, Noyes was “one of only a few voices that chose not to sing in the all-bulls’ choir.” 30 Noyes questioned the viability of the loans that brokers gave customers to purchase stocks and stated his belief that either the market had changed so that “the old rules are wholly abrogated” or that “its reversal, when it comes, may be severe in proportion to the violence of the movement which is interrupted.” 31
Except for The Commercial & Financial Chronicle, the Times was the only media outlet that provided good judgment about the market in 1929, said J. K. Galbraith in The Great Crash 1929. The rest, said the noted economist, “reported the upward sweep of the market in admiration and awe and without alarm.” 32