Last night they lit the Rockefeller Christmas Tree. It is the one time NYC actually blossoms during the Christmas season. The first Christmas tree in NYC was actually erected in 1931 in the worst year of the Great Depression when just about all the foreign sovereign bonds defaulted on Americans causing massive bank failures. The first tree was put up in hopes of raising the spirits of the people in their dark hour of need. It was not the stock market crash that devastated the finances of the people, it was the bond collapse. Andrew Mellon had first commented when bonds rallied and stocks fell in 1929, that this was why “Gentlemen prefer Bonds”. By 1931, those words demonstrated that even conservative men lost their shirts.
