Eric's Beijing Diary

This evening I was flipping through gobs of headlines that had accumulated in my newsreader the past few days while I was out of town, when I noticed that Louis Rukeyser had passed away. A moment of silence would be in order. Louis Rukeyser represented the best of the best of old fashioned American optimism. When it came to optimism, he was the FDR of finance. Although he was sometimes criticized for being too bullish, his simple advice to get out of debt and save for the future was good for average middle class people. And his sense of humor helped to make his advice palatable to viewers for whom the whole world of finance seemed forbidding. Answering a question from a viewer who was investing in a hairpiece company, he said, "If all your money seems to be hair today and gone tomorrow, we'll try to make it grow by giving you the bald facts on how to get your investments toupee." When the market took a dive, he joked about changing the name of the show to "Wall Street Wake." But again, his defining quality was his eternal optimism. It is really what made him an American institution.