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oil restrained consumer spending throughout recent months. For the last eighteen months there has been the risk that falling consumer spending would pull the economy down before very depressed levels of business spending would pick up. Economic reports from February and March suggest that risks are tipping back toward recession.
The bullish argument for the economy is that the uncertainties of war have restrained consumer and business spending. A favorable outcome to the war will, the argument goes, revive confidence and the economy will strengthen. The same points are made to support the view that the stock market is ready to rally.
The less sanguine view is that the effects of the capital spending binge of the late 'nineties and the collapse of the stock market bubble still overhang the economy and the stock market. New post-war problems and the newly-roused enmity of many peoples through the world for the United States may disrupt economic activity and unsettle investment markets. Our cautious investment approach is the safer course while these uncertainties prevail.
LEON LEVY
Leon Levy, one of the greatest investors of the last half century, died on Sunday. Leon began his career at Oppenheimer & Co., a small New York brokerage firm. In 1959, he formed the Oppenheimer Fund, an early mutual fund. Later, and for more than twenty years, Leon and Jack Nash ran Odyssey Partners, one of the most successful investment partnerships in Wall Street's history.
Leon and his wife Shelby White formed the finest collection of Greek and Roman antiquities in the United States and he has been one of the great philanthropists in New York in this generation. In recent years, Leon made important gifts to Rockefeller University, the Metropolitan Museum, Bard College, the New York Botanical Gardens, the American Civil Liberties Union, The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and many other organizations. He chaired investment committees for a number of endowment funds.
I had known Leon slightly for a number of years. Two years ago, I asked him to
serve as an advisor to the endowment fund of Planned Parenthood of New York City, for which I have responsibility as a long-time board member and chair of the investment committee. Once Leon agreed to join my committee, it was easy for me to recruit a number of other eminent persons to serve with him. Over the last eighteen months, I met with Leon every few weeks, either in our advisory committee meetings or privately in his gorgeous office, filled with magnificent Roman and Greek sculptures. We discussed investments, political affairs and the arts, and he helped me with the specific investments and projects with which I am involved.
He was an extraordinarily wise, acute, and generous man. Happily, Leon published his memoirs, The Mind of Wall Street, just a couple of months ago. The book is a delight, far the most interesting investment book I have ever come across. I feel saddened by his death and enormously privileged to have worked with Leon and learned from him over the last year and half. (A warm obituary of Leon from the New York Times may be read at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/obituaries/08LEVY.html)
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