Investing

Howard Stein, former Dreyfus chairman and CEO, dies at 84

Howard Stein, who succeeded Jack Dreyfus at the helm of the Dreyfus mutual-fund company and helped turn a generation of Americans into investors, has died. He was 84.

He died July 26 at his home in Southampton, New York, The New York Times reported, citing his son-in-law, Jamie Stokien. The cause was complications of a stroke.

In word and deed, Stein cultivated Dreyfus’ conservative image, spreading the message that the firm was a safe haven for small investors, no matter their level of income or wealth. That image had been established by Dreyfus through one of the industry’s first advertising campaigns. In television commercials that Stein helped devise, a lion, the firm’s symbol, emerged from a subway station to stride down Wall Street.

Under Stein, Dreyfus in 1974 introduced the first direct- marketed, no-load money-market fund, called Dreyfus Liquid Assets, which allowed investors to avoid up-front fees.

The downside of his cautious approach was that he missed the bull market that swelled the bank accounts of stock investors from 1982 well into the 1990s. During that span, Stein favored short-term tax-exempt bonds, money market funds and cash, according to a 1996 article in Fortune magazine.

“I was stupid! I wasn’t paying attention,” he said in a 1993 interview.

In 1994, Mellon Bank Corp. bought Dreyfus in a stock swap valued at $1.85 billion. Stein remained Dreyfus’s chairman and chief executive until his resignation in 1996.

Love of Politics

Unlike Jack Dreyfus, who left the fund in 1961, Stein never achieved fame commensurate with the money he managed.

“Stein is an omnivorous listener who believes that he can learn more from a dialogue than from the printed word,” Gilbert Edmund Kaplan and Chris Welles wrote in “The Money Managers,” their 1969 book. “He does not read the painstakingly produced outpourings of the institutional research brokers,” nor is he “often swayed by the traditional convincers: numbers.”

He did like consulting with people in government and politics. His interest was such that he took a six-month leave of absence in 1968 to serve as national finance chairman for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign, believing McCarthy’s opposition to the Vietnam War was best for the U.S. economy and stock market.

That stint in politics earned Stein a place on President Richard Nixon’s famous list of enemies. “I couldn’t believe that the president didn’t have more important enemies than me,” Stein joked in the 1993 interview with Bloomberg News.

Buy Polaroid

Howard Mathew Stein was born on Oct. 6, 1926, in New York City, where his Polish-immigrant parents as well as a brother and a sister worked in the garment industry, according to the Times.

The family moved to Manhattan and settled in a flat over the Stage Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue, according to a Time magazine profile in 1970. He played the violin from age 5 and planned to be a professional musician.

He dropped out of a vocational high school, won a music scholarship at the Juilliard School, wrote music and produced some off-Broadway shows, Time said.

After deciding he wouldn’t become a great violinist, he went to work loading steel onto trucks. Through a friend he landed a trainee spot at Bache & Co., where, he told Time, he began responding to stacks of unanswered letters requesting sales brochures.

He joined Dreyfus in 1955 and, according to Time, “earned a reputation as a shrewd stock analyst, helping to steer the fund into rapid risers, including Polaroid.” Within a few years he was chief assistant to the firm’s founder, Jack Dreyfus.

Stein became president in 1965, when the firm went public, and chairman and chief executive in 1970. Time said in 1970 that he made $160,000 per year and also owned 5 percent of the company’s stock, a holding then valued at about $2 million.

According to the Times, survivors include his wife, the former Janet Gelder, and daughters Julia Stokien, Jocelyn Hayes, Jessica Levine, Joanna Stein and Jennifer Seay.

Bloomberg