Marcus Nadler (1895-1965)
Once a penniless immigrant, Dr. Marcus Nadler became a renowned teacher and a much admired and respected economic adviser to bankers, businessmen and policy makers. A native of Austria, Dr. Nadler served in the Austrian army, was wounded and captured by Cossacks in the Ukraine, and spent years in Siberian prison camps before heading for America. He worked his way through an economics course at Columbia University at such a pace that his Professor H. Parker Willis, author of the Federal Reserve Act, sent Nadler to Washington to serve on the research staff of the Federal Reserve Board. He came back to New York to study law at NYU, then returned to Washington to serve as Chief of the Foreign Division of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve until around 1927 when he was invited to join NYU's Faculty of Business as Research Director of the newly created Institute of International Finance.

When the stock market crashed in 1929 and the banking system collapsed, an intellectual paralysis and a profound loss of confidence beset the financial industry. It was Dr. Nadler who guided a whole generation of bankers and financiers past their panic to a new world of finance. To counter the pessimism that haunted the marketplace, Dr. Nadler developed four simple propositions known as Old Doc Nadler's Remedy...

• You're right if you bet that the United States Economy will continue to expand.
• You're wrong if you bet that it is going to stand still or collapse.
• You're right if you bet that men in business, labor and government are sane, reasonably well informed and essentially decent people who can be counted on to find common ground among all their conflicting interests and work out a compromise solution to the big issues that confront them.
• You're wrong if you bet that any one element of our society is going to run or wreck the country.

With his reputation as a major forecaster established, Dr. Nadler's following quickly outgrew the small classroom. Twice a week, in a large penthouse auditorium overlooking the financial district, hundreds of his "students" would gather, some seeking college credit but most already at or near the top of their profession-presidents, vice presidents, partners and policy-level executives of every major bank, insurance company and brokerage house in New York. Out of these classes sprang what was considered then and continues to be one of the liveliest and most unusual clubs in the city.