Black Friday

For more information on Black Friday, visit Britannica.com.

1. A day of stock market catastrophe. Originally, Sept 24, 1869 was deemed Black Friday. The crash was sparked by gold speculators, including Jay Gould and James Fist, who attempted to corner the gold market. The attempt failed and the gold market collapsed, causing the stock market to plummet.

2. The day after Thanksgiving in the United States. Retailers generally see an upward spike in sales and consider this to be the start of the holiday shopping season. It's common for retailers to offer special promotions and to open early to draw in customers.

Investopedia Says:
1. The term "black" has been used to describe other disastrous days in financial markets. For example, on Black Tuesday, Oct 29, 1929, the market fell precipitously signaling the start of the Great Depression. Additionally, the largest one-day drop in stock market history occurred on Black Monday, Oct 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted more than 22%.

2. The idea behind the term Black Friday is that this is the day in which retail stores have enough sales to put them "in the black" - an accounting expression that alludes to the practice of recording losses in red and profits in black.

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Sharp drop in a financial market. The original Black Friday was September 24, 1869, when a group of financiers tried to corner the gold market and precipitated a business panic followed by a depression. The panic of 1873 also began on Friday, and Black Friday now applies to any Friday when there is a debacle affecting the financial markets.

1.  Also Black Monday, Black Tuesday, etc. A day of economic catastrophe, as in We feared there'd be another Black Friday. This usage dates from September 24, 1869, a Friday when stock manipulators Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to corner the gold market and caused its collapse. The adjective black has been appended to similar occasions ever since, including October 29, 1929, the Tuesday of the market collapse that marked the start of the Great Depression, and Black Monday of October 19, 1987, when the stock market experienced its greatest fall since the Great Depression.
2.  Any day marked by great confusion or activity, as in It was just my luck to be traveling on Black Tuesday. This usage, too, is based on the events of 1869, marked by economic chaos. It has since been extended to other kinds of confusion, such as an accident hampering traffic during the evening rush hour.

Black Friday (24 September 1869) was the climactic day of an effort by the financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk Jr., with the help of President Ulysses S. Grant's brother-in-law Abel Rathbone Corbin and one or two associates, to corner the ready gold supply of the United States. Because the nation was then on a paper money basis, gold was dealt in as a speculative commodity on the New York exchange. On 2 September Gould began buying gold on a large scale; on 15 September, Fisk also began buying heavily and soon forced the price from $135 to $140. The movement excited much suspicion and fear, and the New York Tribune argued that the Treasury had the "plain and imperative" duty to sell gold and break up the conspiracy. Secretary of the Treasury George S. Boutwell visited New York but decided not to act. Meanwhile, Grant had gone to Washington, Pennsylvania, and was out of touch until he returned to Washington, D.C., on 22 September. On 23 September, with gold at $144, the New York panic grew serious.

On 24 September, as the price rose to $160, Secretary Boutwell urged the sale of $3 million of the federal government's gold reserve. Grant suggested $5 million, and Boutwell telegraphed an order to sell $4 million. Gould, perhaps forewarned by the head of the New York sub-treasury, had already begun selling, and gold sank rapidly to $135. Fisk immediately found means to repudiate his contracts. The episode ruined scores of investors, caused heavy indirect losses to business, and placed an ugly smirch on the Grant administration. Gould and Fisk made an $11 million profit.

Bibliography

Ackerman, Kenneth D. The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1988.

Boutwell, George S. Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs. New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1902.

Brands, H. W. Masters of Enterprise: Giants of American Business from John Jacob Astor and J. P. Morgan to Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey. New York: Free Press, 1999.

McFeely, William S. Grant: A Biography. Newtown, Conn.: American Political Biography Press, 1996. The original edition was published in 1981.

—Allan Nevins/C. P.

Photograph of the black board in the New York Gold Room, September 24, 1869, showing the collapse of the price of gold. Handwritten caption by James A. Garfield indicates it was used as evidence before the Committee of Banking & Currency during hearings in 1870.

Black Friday, September 24, 1869, also known as the Fisk/Gould scandal, was a financial panic in the United States caused by two speculators’ efforts to corner the gold market on the New York Gold Exchange. It was one of several scandals that rocked the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. During the American Civil War, the United States government issued a large amount of money that was backed by nothing but credit. After the war ended, people commonly believed that the U.S. Government would buy back the “greenbacks” with gold. In 1869, a group of speculators, headed by James Fisk and Jay Gould, sought to profit off this by cornering the gold market. Gould and Fisk first recruited Grant’s brother-in-law, a financier named Abel Corbin. They used Corbin to get close to Grant in social situations, where they would argue against government sale of gold, and Corbin would support their arguments. Corbin convinced Grant to appoint General Daniel Butterfield as assistant Treasurer of the United States. Butterfield agreed to tip the men off when the government intended to sell gold.

In the late summer of 1869, Gould began buying large amounts of gold. This caused prices to rise and stocks to plummet. After Grant realized what had happened, the federal government sold $4 million in gold. On September 20, 1869, Gould and Fisk started hoarding gold, driving the price higher. On September 24 the premium on a gold Double Eagle (representing 0.9675 troy ounce of gold bullion at $20) was 30 percent higher than when Grant took office. But when the government gold hit the market, the premium plummeted within minutes. Investors scrambled to sell their holdings, and many of them, including Corbin, were ruined. Fisk and Gould escaped significant financial harm.

Subsequent Congressional investigation into the scandal was limited because Virginia Corbin and First Lady Julia Grant were not permitted to testify. However, Butterfield resigned from the U.S. Treasury. Henry Adams, who believed that President Ulysses S. Grant had tolerated, encouraged, and perhaps even participated in corruption and swindles, attacked Grant in an 1870 article entitled The New York Gold Conspiracy.

Although Grant was not directly involved in the scandal his personal association with Gould and Fisk gave clout to their Wall Street financial gold market swindle. Also, Grant had ordered the Secretary of Treasury to release gold in order to stop the gold market manipulation. Grant had personally declined to listen to Gould's ambitious plan to corner the gold market, since the scheme was not announced publicly.^[1]

Contents 1 Sources 2 Further reading 3 References 4 External links

Sources

• E. Benjamin Andrews. History of the United States from the Earliest Discovery of America to the Present Day, Volume IV (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895), courtesy of Clipart ETC

Further reading

• Ackerman, Kenneth D. (1988). The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Gould, and Black Friday, 1869. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. ISBN 0396090656. 

References

1. ^ Jean Edward Smith, Grant, pgs 481-490, Simon & Shuster, 2001.

External links

• NY Times - Oct. 16, 1869 Harper’s Weekly Cartoon: "Black Friday" and the Attempt to Corner the Gold Market.
• Illustration: "The New York Gold Room on 'Black Friday,' September 24, 1869."—E. Benjamin Andrews 1895

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v • d • e   Black days of the week Black Monday · Black Tuesday · Black Wednesday · Black Thursday · Black Friday · Black Saturday · Black Sunday

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