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suggesting that commissions might be cut for the benefit of the customers.
        It was an inspirational performance, and the audience acclaimed it rapturously. A few years earlier, most of them would have examined the entrails of a goat for economic pointers as soon as they would have listened seriously to Bernard Cornfeld. Some of them remained a little dubious about some of the things they had heard about his early days, a little shocked by some of the things the sec had found out about him. Others were amused by his personal flamboyance - the tufty beard and the nippy-waisted French tailored suit. But after all they liked to think of themselves as a bit piratical too. 'Conservative' had become a bad word in their vocabulary, and many of them, while not going so far as to sport beards, had been carefully growing their sidewhiskers for several months in search of a more emancipated image. The main point was that Bernie Cornfeld was playing their tune: happy days are here again, and to hell with the spoilsports from the sec.
        Cornfeld had shown that his heart was sound by paying tribute to the social importance and wisdom of his hearers. And had he not proved his worth - while incidentally demonstrating the superiority of American get-up-and-go to the effete European establishment - by accumulating more than two billion dollars in assets under his management?
        There seems often to be a moment, just before the climax of any great folly, when even the sturdiest scepticism surrenders. Wall Street is not mainly populated by fools, and there were plenty of clever men present to hear Cornfeld's speech who knew what nonsense he was talking. Many of them knew, for example, that while he was denouncing the sec for not having regulated unregistered securities, his own funds were stuffed with them. Some of them, come to that, had sold them to him. Again, when he talked piously about brokerage commissions, there were plenty who knew that the sec had caught IOS diverting brokerage on a massive scale - not to the customers, but to themselves, via, on one occasion, a lady called Gloria Martica Clapp, who lived in the Bahamas. In more general terms, few who stopped to think for a second could have seriously accepted the thesis that the sec was out to destroy the securities business. But when the old tin kettle is drummed hard enough, disbelief is often silent.
        It was not only Wall Street that acclaimed Bernie Cornfeld that week. The night before his speech, he attended the annual cocktail party which the Washington Post gives in New York. The guest list reflects that well-informed newspaper's judgement of who really matters in the city. It includes writers, bankers, politicians, political hostesses and artists. In 1970 the unofficial but undisputed guest of honour in this company was the legendary Bernard Cornfeld, prophet of people's capitalism. He was, from all accounts, the success of the evening: warm, modest, amiable and statesmanlike - drinking, as always, nothing stronger than Coca-cola, speaking softly, and retiring early.
        A short while later, New York magazine published an article which rounds out this picture of Cornfeld at the height of his glory. It described an extraordinary meeting, a sort of Field of the Bed of Mink, between Cornfeld and that other merchant of fantasy, Hugh Hefner. Shortly after the Institutional Investor meeting, the two of them had retired, with their respective retinues of counsellors, hangers-on, girlfriends and servants, to Acapulco, where they wished to discuss possible joint ventures in the real estate business. (Cornfeld, it alleged, was not much taken with the layout in Hefner's private aircraft, known as the Big Bunny.) Altogether, the article portrayed Cornfeld as frivolous in a way which would have been lethal a few short years before, to a man who depended as he did on the approval of the financial community. No damage seems to have been done: the late Roman