Business Career
Kennedy made a large fortune as a stock market and commodity investor and by investing in real estate and a wide range of industries. He never built a significant business from scratch, but his timing as both buyer and seller was usually excellent. Sometimes he made use of inside information in ways which were legal at the time but were later outlawed. Rumors claimed that Kennedy was associated with the "bear raid" that precipitated the Wall Street Crash of 1929. President Franklin D. Roosevelt later appointed Kennedy first chairman of the SEC. After Kennedy's death, gangster Frank Costello claimed an association with Kennedy for bootlegging during Prohibition. When Fortune magazine published its first list of the richest people in the United States in 1957, it placed him in the $200–400 million band ($1.65–3.31 billion today), meaning that it estimated him to be between the ninth and sixteenth richest person in the United States at that time.
Read more about this topic: Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.
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