Sublime

at the frontiers where new capital rights are minted day by day in the offices of law firms, states take a back seat. But states provide the legal tools that lawyers use; and they offer their law enforcement apparatus to enforce the capital that lawyers have crafted.

All of these businesses operated below the radar screen of megacapitalists like the Morgans. Their primary capital expenses were for real estate and inventory, which could be financed by traditional mortgages and bank working capital lines. But that was true only because they could “externalize” the cost of all the shipping infrastructure that

At the time, of course, no one could know the potential value of these securities. On the face of it, the associates had laid out a total of $10 to $11 million and become primary owners of a corporation capitalized at $31,486,000. As the road developed under expert management, though, it naturally increased sharply in value and earned handsome

Harriman and Schiff pressed for the allowance of a one-third interest in the Burlington for the UP, to achieve a soothing community of interest. The Morgan-Hill forces turned them down flat. Such an accommodation, they purred, might represent an illegal “restraint of trade” under federal statute. To understand the fierce struggle that now erupted,

The frenzied search for the scarce remaining shares needed to make a majority for either the Morgan-Hill allies or the Harriman group now set off one of the wildest episodes the stock market has ever witnessed.

Sam had handed Ryan his checkbook and told him to buy office space and as much worker housing as fast as possible without worrying about the cost. No man was ever so good at not worrying about the cost as Ryan. In a matter of weeks, he had snapped up between $250 and $300 million in real estate, including $153 million worth of condos in an