In early 1970’s Ben Graham wrote a prophetic piece about future threats to equities, where he rightly predicted that Wall Street greed would always be the biggest threat to equity investors. In some ways, the picture Graham paints of the 1969-1974 market sentiment is similar to today’s. A fragment of the article is included below.

Experience suggests therefore that the various threats to equities are not very different from other obstacles that common stocks have faced and surmounted in the past. My prediction is that stocks will surmount them in the future.

But I cannot leave my subject without alluding to another menace to equity values not touched on in my terms of reference. This is the loss of public confidence in the financial community growing out of its own conduct in recent years. I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street. Edward Gibbon and Oliver Goldsmith both wrote that, “History is little more than a register of the crimes, the follies and the misfortunes of mankind.” This phrase applies to Wall Street history in the 1968 to 73 period, but with more emphasis to be given to its crimes and follies than to its misfortunes.

 I have not time even to list all the glaring categories of imprudent and inefficient business practice, of shabby and shoddy ethics perpetrated by financial houses and individuals, without the excuse of poverty or ignorance to palliate their misdemeanors. Just one incredible example: Did anyone ever hear of a whole industry almost going bankrupt because it was accepting more business than it could handle? That is what happened to our proud NYSE community in 1969, with their back-office mix ups, missing securities, etc. The abuses in the financial practices of many corporations during the same period paint the same melancholy picture.

It may take many years—and new legislation—for public confidence in Wall Street to be restored and in the meantime stock prices may languish. But I should think the true investor would be pleased, rather than discouraged, at the prospect of investing his new savings on very satisfactory terms.

To pension-fund managers, especially with large and annual increments to invest, the prospects are especially inviting. Could they have imagined five years ago that they would be able to buy AAA bonds on an eight to nine per cent basis, and the shares of sound companies on a 15 per cent or better earnings yield? The opportunities available today afford a more promising investment approach than the recent absurd idea of aiming at, say, 25 per cent market appreciation by shifting equities among institutions at constantly higher price levels—a bootstrap operation if there ever was one.

Let me close with a quotation from Virgil, my favorite poet. It is inscribed beneath a large picture panel at the head of the grand staircase of the Department of Agriculture building in Washington. It reads:

 “O fortunati nimium.. .(etc.) Agricolae!”

Virgil addressed this apostrophe to the Roman farmers of his day, but I shall direct it at the common-stock buyers of this and future years:

“O enviably fortunate Investors, if only you realized your current advantages!”

- Benjamin Graham