If there's one thing I find especially bothersome its having my enjoyment of a good read interrupted by the author's use of a word I have never seen before.
This morning, as I was once again enjoying one of John Brooks tales of the misadventures of Wall Street, this one being a recounting of an enormous commodities fraud perpetrated in 1963 that cost a number of American and International banking and trading corporations 180 million dollars (which would be over 1.8 billion dollars in 2024 dollars).
Yeah, that pales when compared to the losses caused by Enron, WorldCom, and of course Madoff, but bear in mind this was at a time when Wall Street was extremely conservative and rigorous oversight was the norm.
This sordid criminal exercise became known as the Salad Oil scandal, and was pretty much the worst case of fiscal skullduggery since the McKesson & Robbins scandal of 1938. The efforts made by the New York Stock Exchange to mitigate the damage and offset losses to average investors (and save face) is the basis of Mr. Brooks story, and the word he slipped in that tripped me up was "eleemosynary".
Eleemosynary. Mr. Brooks must have had one helluva Thesaurus.
Eleemosynary is an adjective and is defined as "related to or being dependent on charity. Charitable."
I had to pause my reading just to look that up, though in the context it was being used I kinda suspected the definition was pretty much that.
Which lead to me spending an inordinate amount of time just pondering the idea that stockbrokers could be altruistic.
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