Andrew Ross Sorkin

One is Charlie Mitchell, this fellow who runs National City.

He is the Jamie Dimon of his time in terms of fame.

He might actually be more like Michael Milken because he really does develop sort of credit for the public.

Michael, of course, did it for businesses later.

They used to call him Sunshine Charlie.

And he was on the board of the New York Fed.

He was constantly calling for lower interest rates, interestingly, during all of this.

And he was the guy who was not just loaning to speculators and stockholders.

He was also loaning money to different brokerage houses across the country.

On the other side of the story in Washington is a guy who you probably heard of or know named Carter Glass.

Yeah.

Carter Glass was the Elizabeth Warren of his time, or maybe even like AOC.

AOC, yeah.

And he would, by the way, he was like a racist Elizabeth Warren, interestingly, given the weird things going on down there at the time.

Anyway, he would rail for years about this thing that he described as Mitchellism.

He believed that Charlie Mitchell and what Charlie Mitchell was doing was gonna upend the economy effectively.

And as the story plays out, they are sort of pitted against each other.

One of the things that Charlie does is he defies, or at least appears at one point to defy the Federal Reserve, which is trying to clamp down on speculation.

They don't try to raise interest rates.

What they weirdly do is they send a letter to all the banks saying, please stop lending to speculators.