Joseph P. Kennedy was born to a prominent Irish Catholic politician, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, in 1888. He attended Boston Latin School and eventually went on to attend Harvard College, and graduated in 1912. In 1913, he borrowed money to buy back control of the Columbia Trust Bank when it was under threat of takeover and was then made the President of the Bank in 1914.
In 1919, he joined Hayden, Stone, & Co., a prominent stock brokerage company at the time. He learned to be an expert dealer in the unregulated stock market using insider information and market manipulation.
In 1929, now at his own firm, he and group of other Irish Catholic investors established a "stock pool" to drive up the value of the pool operators' holdings up by bribing journalists to publish information in an advantageous manner. This worked on the unregulated stocks because the investors had inside information and they knew that the general public lacked stock knowledge. Then, Kennedy pulled all his money out of the stock market before the crash because he claimed the rampant speculation indicated to him there would be a crash.
During the Great Depression, Kennedy had kept his fortune because he got out in time and had begun investing in real estate properties, specializing in the downtrodden ones and fixing them up. He also went into the Hollywood film industry by buying up the production theaters and screening theaters and combining many of them to create one larger entity. He also invested heavily in distilleries turning a fortune after Prohibition ended.
Joseph Kennedy was able to not only survive the Depression, but thrive because he was a stock broker who knew the tricks to his trade and because he realized what the speculation he had helped create would mean for the stock market and he made wise investments with the money he had saved after the crash.
I know we had talked about how, although many people greatly suffered from the Depression, some actually profited. This post made me really curious about who else profited from the Great Depression, so I looked it up. According to the website Mental Floss (http://mentalfloss.com/article/22504/10-people-who-made-fortune-during-depression), it seems that a lot of people who worked in entertainment actually benefited from the Depression: Charles Darrow, inventor of the game Monopoly, baseball legend Babe Ruth, and movie stars James Cagney and Gene Autry. As you said, even Kennedy was involved in entertainment, making an impact in the Hollywood Film Industry. I find it really interesting that, in a time of depression and suffering, entertainment was one of the most lucrative industries in the US.
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