In 1975, when the Securities and Exchange Commission moved Wall Street from fixed commissions to negotiated ones, Siebert retooled Muriel Siebert & Co. into a discount brokerage, cutting her rate in half for individual investors.
Paper Billionaire
She went on to serve five years as New York State’s first female superintendent of banks. Following an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 1982, she returned to her brokerage, which she took public in 1996 under the holding company Siebert Financial.
The brokerage offered clients the option to trade online, and for two brief periods in 1999, as Internet-related stocks soared, her 90-percent-plus ownership stake made her, on paper, a billionaire. Within months, some $700 million of that disappeared.
Siebert, who had seen similar bubbles burst before, said she hadn’t let her hopes ride
with the share prices.
“The day-traders giveth and the day-traders taketh away,” she said in a November 1999 interview. Of her paper billion, she added: “At least I didn’t write a check for that amount.”
Siebert was born on Sept. 12, 1932, in Cleveland, the daughter of Irwin Siebert, a dentist, and the former Margaret Roseman.
Senate Bid
Describing herself as “very conservative fiscally and probably quite liberal in terms of people and human rights,” she stepped down in May 1982 to seek the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She lost to Florence Sullivan, a member of the state Assembly who went on to lose to Moynihan.
Siebert never married. Starting in 1999, she developed and promoted an academic curriculum to teach personal-finance skills to high-school students.