Irving Kahn, who has died aged 109, was Wall Street’s – and probably the world’s – oldest active stockmarket investor.
Kahn began his career with the brokerage firm of Kuhn Loeb and made his first trade in June 1929, selling short 50 shares of a red-hot stock called Magna Copper which he believed was over-valued; his $300 stake, borrowed from an in-law, more than doubled when the Great Crash struck four months later. But he was not by nature a short-term speculator: rather, he said in an interview 85 years later: “I prefer to be slow and steady… If a stock goes down, I have time to weather the storm, maybe buy more at the lower price. If my arguments for the investment haven’t changed, then I should like the stock even more when it goes down.”
It was an approach he had learned in the 1930s from Benjamin Graham, the British-born Columbia Business School professor who was the father of “value investing” – the technique of picking, and holding for the long term, stocks that represent “a dollar selling for 50 cents” and thereby carry a built-in “margin of safety”. Kahn attended Graham’s evening classes at Columbia, worked with him as a research assistant and business associate, and gave one of his sons Graham as a middle name (as did a younger disciple, the billionaire Warren Buffett).
Kahn went on to become a partner of Abraham & Co, which was acquired by Lehman Bros, and in 1978 he founded his own brokerage and investment advisory firm, Kahn Brothers, which grew to manage funds of $1 billion. Much of his time as chairman was devoted to poring over technical journals and company reports in search of “value where others have missed it”, having long since “stopped wasting time on what people claimed a stock was worth and started looking at the numbers”. His preferred time horizon for this process was “decades”: he advised other investors to tune out prevailing market views and ignore the modern world’s “superfluity of information… all this static in the air”.
He also cautioned against excessive borrowing, and supported proposals to reintroduce a separation of retail banks from those that trade in securities, because “I wouldn’t lend you a dime if I knew you loved to gamble at a casino”. Financial crises, he opined, were too often the result of “a bunch of gamblers going crazy on the floor of the exchange”.
The remarkable longevity of Kahn and his siblings, without serious illness, became the subject of medical-school study: his sister Helen almost reached 110, his brother Peter died at 103 and another sister, Leonore, at 101. The diminutive Irving had smoked until he was 50 and preferred cheeseburgers to salad, but at 108 he still commuted the short journey from his apartment to his office three days a week to discuss investment possibilities with his son Tom, who had taken over the running of the firm, and his analyst grandson Andrew; the latter had been reading to him from The Economist on the day he died.
The son of a Polish immigrant salesman of electrical goods, Irving Kahn was born in Manhattan on December 19 1905 and was educated at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx before dropping out of college to find work as a Wall Street clerk.
He was a founder member of the New York Society of Security Analysts and a co-founder of the New York City Job and Career Centre, which offered vocational training to high-school pupils. His standard advice to young people starting out was: “Figure out what you like to do and do that. Don’t worry about the money. If you’re good at what you do, the money will take care of itself.”
Irving Kahn married, in 1931, Ruth Perl, whom he met at Columbia University when she was studying for a doctorate in psychology; she died in 1996. They had three sons, of whom two survive him.
The global pop sensation of the year has got us all excited about South Korea. Welcome to the world of K-culture
Gangnam Style, a novelty song by the South Korean rapper Psy, is the global pop sensation of 2012. It is No1 on the UK singles chart and has been viewed more than 360 million times on YouTube. Britney Spears asked Psy to teach her his rodeo-riding dance live on Ellen DeGeneres’s TV show. Even a YouTube clip of five Korean girls dancing to Gangnam Style has been viewed more than 35 million times.
Now, just as The Killing led to a mania for “Nordic noir” TV cop shows, so Gangnam Style has led to a fad for K-pop, the pop music of South Korea. But why stop there? Why not dive into the whole of K-culture? Here is your instant, 10-point bluffer’s guide…
1 K-song: Gangnam Style, named after the swanky Gangnam area of Seoul, epitomises both the pervasive cultural influence of the West and the rising economic power of the East. The Korean lyrics may be incomprehensible, but anyone can enjoy the irrepressibly camp energy and charm of Psy himself, as he bops around Seoul chanting, “Hey, sexy lady!” What also comes across is an incredible sense of energy and confidence – the product of a culture that is clearly going places.
2 K-star: Psy – real name Park Jae-sang ­– grew up in Gangnam. The 34-year-old son of a factory owner, he was educated at Boston University and the prestigious Berklee College of Music. His first hip hop album, Psy – From the Psycho World (2001), led to a fine for “inappropriate content”; and his second album was barred to buyers under 19. He was drafted into the army from 2007 to 2009, interrupting his music career, but Gangnam Style has taken him back to the top.
3 K-pop: US forces have been stationed in South Korea for the past 60 years, inspiring a mix of Asian and Western sounds: sugary Japanese pop, pounding dance rhythms and rap all rolled into one. If you like Gangnam Style, try Fantastic Baby by the boyband Big Bang, whose video rivals Lady Gaga for fashionista eccentricity and excess. Who’d have thought that Koreans would dress like futuristic glam rockers and chant “Boomshakalaka,” but they do.
4 K-Belgium: A recent article in the Huffington Post argues that South Korea is Asia’s Belgium: a small, inoffensive nation squeezed between bigger, often antagonistic neighbours. But, while tensions between China and Japan rise, no one (apart from North Korea) hates South Korea. This makes Gangnam Style the Tintin of South Korea: its calling card to the world.
5 K-facts: South Korea has a population of 49 million, with an average life expectancy of 78.6. Its economy is ranked 15th in the world, growing by 3.6 per cent last year. The population is ethnically homogenous and the single biggest religion is Christianity, accounting for 26.3 per cent of the population.
6 K-films: South Korean film-makers are catching up with their Chinese and Japanese peers. Beginners should start with Park Chan-wook’s thriller Oldboy, winner of the Grand Prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and rated among the best 100 films of all time by the Internet Movie Database website. This extraordinary tale of imprisonment and revenge is as violent, twisted and stylish as anything by Tarantino.
7 K-fashion: South Korean style is being promoted through “Seoul’s 10 Soul”: 10 designers displaying their work at showrooms in Paris and Milan. The cutting-edge Korean menswear label General Idea has opened a Manhattan boutique. Its designer is a cool, moustachioed, shades-wearing hipster. The only micro-problemette: his name is Choi Bum-suk.
8 K-cuisine: The traditional view of Korean food can be summed up by the Manchester United fans’ chant for their Korean star, Park Ji-sung, “Park, Park wherever you may be / You eat dogs in your home country.” But Korea’s robust, spicy cuisine, based around rice, grilled meats and kimchi (the national dish of fermented cabbage, radish and cucumber) is growing in popularity here. There are more than 50 Korean restaurants in London alone.
9 K-cars: Korea is the world’s fifth biggest car producer, but its products were long considered inferior to Japanese machines. That’s changing, however, with Hyundai leading the way. Even the Top Gear pundits admit that “their model line-up is now garnering some genuine credibility”. And in 2010, Hyundai was named as “preferred supplier” of cars to the British police.
10 K-phones: The Korean-made Galaxy SIII smart phone hit the headlines recently when a California court ordered its makers, Samsung, to pay Apple $1 billion for infringement of copyrights. Buoyed by all the free publicity, US sales of the Galaxy soared, briefly overtaking the iPhone. Industry analysts concluded that by telling the world that the Galaxy was really just like the iPhone, only cheaper, Apple had done Samsung a billion-dollar favour.
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U.S. jails are home to 20 percent of the world’s prisoners and according to the constitution, more than six million convicted felons are disenfranchised and prohibited from voting, the Sentencing Project Organization said.
A felony in the United States carries with it a number of consequences. Regardless of whether a person has served prison time, their past actions are branded on their criminal record for life and offenders are stripped of their civic right to vote.
Due to the decentralized nature of voting regulations, the length of this restriction is left to the discretion of the state and could vary from a few years to life. The governors of Vermont and Maine, for instance, believe every vote counts and slide ballots through the bars of their prison cells to allow felons to participate. In 15 states, some of which hold the highest crime rate in the nation, voter right is restored after convicts are released from prison.
However, in California, Colorado, and Connecticut, ex-felons must first complete their prison and parole requirements before applying for the return of their voting rights. In 20 other states, felons can try to regain their rights after ending their parole and probation. While in 10 states, felons may never participate in local or federal elections again.
Kamy Akhavan, the CEO of ProCon.org, a non-profit research group who has been active in researching the pros and cons of voting rights for prisoners and ex-convicts, told teleSUR, “(The felon) population in some states is a big number. The United States imprisons more people per capita in total than any other country on the planet.
“However, in some states, it is disproportionately high...like Florida, you see over 10 percent of their eligible voting population are not allowed to vote; they are disenfranchised. They would, in theory, be allowed to vote were it not for the felony committed somewhere in their past,” Akhavan said.
Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University said, “You steal a chicken, it’s a felony; you go to jail and you lose the right [to vote] … You have more and more people being thrown into jail, and mostly Blacks—these laws are not basically applied to whites very often.”
Since 1976, the number of U.S. incarcerations and disenfranchisement cases have skyrocketed from 1.17 million to 6.1 million, a figure attributed to both the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing policies which were introduced in the last 50 years.
Over 1.5 million ex-felons are now residing in Florida and 20 percent of African Americans residents are prohibited from voting. Nationwide statistics show that 33 percent of African Americans hold a felony conviction, while a Black man is five times more likely to have served time in prison than his non-colored counterparts.
“It is certainly disheartening to see the disproportionate number of people of color behind bars in the United States in general, it is not representative or proportionate of our population...how would these people vote if they were not in prison. Well, more likely or not, they would be democratic voters,” Akhavan told teleSUR.
Based on the demographic information, the majority of felons are from left-wing minority groups, Akhavan said. He added that some politicians say that with their participation and their support as registered Democrats, they could potentially swing an election.
“On the flipside of that, Republicans regularly charge that the Democrats only want to re-enfranchise felons and ex-felons in order to win elections and that is what they see as the real motivation. So both sides are kind of pointing at each other as using felons as pawns in some type of political calculation to win elections, and in some degree, they’re both right,” said Akhavan.
“There is some merit to arguments on both sides. I think if you look at the bigger picture too, what’s happening now with the 2018 midterm elections, and the disenfranchisement that is happening around the country in serious forms of voter suppression, I think people will mostly look at the felon voting issue as very much in line with this general trend of a political calculation to disenfranchise certain populations for political reasons,” the ProCON official said.
This year, Amendment 4 is making its debut on Florida ballots on Nov. 6, during the U.S. midterm elections. After nearly 20 years of fluctuating legislation regarding the rights restoration process due to gubernatorial changes in the state, advocacy groups have banded together to solve the issue once and for all.
Florida currently holds one of the strictest felon-disenfranchisement policies in the country and Amendment 4 would essentially simplify the process for all ex-convicts except murderers and sex offenders.
“We get emails and contacts every week from felons who want to have their right to vote restored and they’re not sure how to do it. Some of them are so motivated that no matter what the hurtle is- no matter what it takes...and it’s no small feat and yet they are so motivated that they will pursue it and pursue it until they finally can have that happen for them. I think that kind of personal commitment to wanting to have their voice heard, to wanting to participate in a democracy,” said Akhavan.
Leading the initiative is a former congressional chief of staff, Neil Volz, convicted for lobby scandal, and Desmond Meade, a former homeless man convicted on drug and weapon charges. Dozens of human rights organizations have shown their support such as the American Civilian Liberties Union, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, and the Brennan Center for Justice, among many others.
“What’s interesting in Florida is that the people kind of stepped into the equation. They got enough signatures on the ballot in order to make it a constitutional amendment, which if it passes, it means that legislators will have a far harder time of altering the will of the people in that state,” said Akhavan, whose organization is dedicated informing the public on highly political and controversial issues from a non-partisan perspective.
“In using the ballot process, it was a really novel way of intervening...I suspect if it works in Florida, that we’ll see similar efforts across other states where they do have this ballot process available to them,” he said.
In October, a poll conducted by Suffolk University showed that of the 500 participants surveyed, over 70 percent were in favor of Amendment 4, 20 percent were against, and eight were undecided. The proposal needs to win at least 60 percent of the vote in order to pass.
“The United States does not have an especially high turn-out rate, in fact we are not even in the top 20 for democratic countries for voter turnout. We look at what these people who are disenfranchised what they do to gain that right to vote, how much they appreciate, value and treasure it… that sort of passion for democracy is truly inspirational,” Akhavan said.