Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? Read Online Free Page B

ringing.
        So Cowett reacted to the bad news with his habitual coolness. For some time, he continued to insist that the profits were, not the $17.9 million his own controller had told him, but $25 million.
        But the truth could not be hidden for ever. That telephone call to Tokyo was the beginning of the end. Bit by bit, the real state of affairs began to leak out. The sales operation was running into a loss… The profits from managing the funds had been propped up by the Arctic deal… The money raised from the public issue of IOS Ltd shares, little more than six months before, had all been spent.
        At the very moment when Cornfeld, parading himself to the world as a major prophet, was achieving his greatest public acceptance, the train of events was under way which was to expose the absurdity of his pretensions.
        Less than a year later, he was back in Acapulco. His shares in IOS had been sold, and he had cut his last links with the business he had created. Hardly anyone wanted to hear his views on the future of society any more. No one in their senses could believe any longer that Investors Overseas Services would ever have fifteen billion dollars under management, still less that it would be the greatest single economic force in the free world.
        Within weeks of Cornfeld's tirade against the sec, the stock market cracked and fell even more steeply. 'This decline, the largest and most protracted since World War II,' one of the best-respected investment men on Wall Street wrote, 'was a severe reaction to a period of excessive speculation.' Cornfeld blamed the sec for what had happened. We shall see that his own organization was not merely a victim of the market break; by a combination of sheer size and reckless commitment to excessive speculation, it was one of its principal causes.
        It is only fair to say that Institutional Investor remained loyal to the prophet it had sponsored. At its annual conference for 1971, Mr Bernard Cornfeld was again asked to speak. This time, however, his appointed topic was: 'What went wrong?'
        It is time to take a detailed look at what did go wrong. When we have done so, it will become plain that the really interesting question is not so much why Cornfeld and his friends failed. It is how they managed to succeed as long as they did.
        For this is not only a story about Bernard Cornfeld and Edward Cowett. They could never have flourished as they did without the acquiescence, and sometimes the active help, of others. Victory, they say, has many fathers, but defeat is always an orphan. It was the same at IOS. After the crash, it was surprising how many people gave us the same excuse: 'We never knew!' It is hard to believe that they could not have found out if they had wanted to. This is a story largely populated by people who didn't want to know, and grew rich in ignorance.
        Not all of them were inside IOS. For outside the company and its associates, there were concentric rings of others, less responsible for what happened, but still willing to profit in some degree from what was done. IOS worked with accountants, lawyers, bankers, brokers, advertising men and publicists of every kind. No doubt they didn't know quite how dishonest IOS was capable of being. But again, in too many cases, they didn't want to know.
        For the real importance of this story is not that a particular group of men managed to get away with certain manoeuvres which are not allowed by most developed legal systems. It is not even that a very large number of people lost a great deal of money as a result. The real lesson of the IOS story is an old one: it is that human communication is so fragile that a man can put out whatever propaganda he likes in his own interests and be sure that enough of it will be believed to make his fortune.
        The dwindling, but still huge pile of money in the IOS funds is a monument, not only to the energy of the legendary