Business & Finance: The Public Invited

• Share

Last week, only one member was carried from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in a state of complete collapse. A petition circulated among members for a three day holiday, Good Friday, the intervening Saturday and Easter Monday, appeared to find more brokers fascinated by the profits of 4,000,000 share sessions than worried by the danger of physical ruin. Every "record" of any shape or description was broken and rebroken.

The explanation is simple. The "public" had finally come in, tardily, clumsily, "at the top," as always, with the greatest reservoir of cash of all, compared to which Wall Street's organized money force is small. It astonished nobody, because 7,000 tickers are now hypnotizing greedy eyes in 40 states, leaving scarcely a middle-sized town from Maine to California where citizens may not actually see their savings bank withdrawals dance past their giddy eyes in strange, cryptic abbreviations three minutes after passing their checks to the broker.

As is usual near any peak of stock market enthusiasm, an oracle of immense prestige dramatically crowed at the precise moment when the market needed a cheery word to carry it into still higher price area. In July 1926, Thomas Cochran, Morgan partner, was interviewed the midnight he sailed for Europe. He was said to have said that General Motors "should.and will" go 100 points higher.

It did. Last week it was Finance Chairman John J. Raskob, guiding financial genius of General Motors, also in a leave-taking ship-news speech, who spoke the word. He was reported as saying that General Motors stock should be selling at $225 a share. It was then selling at $187.25. It shot up to $199, and in two hours of trading the shares of his corporation increased $47,850,000 in value, making an aggregate market value for the company of $3,306,000,000, another record gone. (U.S. Steel's stock is worth $1,081,667,720.)

What happened last week, what usually happens, was this: Mr. Raskob's magic figure of $225 a share for General Motors, was interpreted out of what he said.

Gardner D. Stout, third generation member of the Stock Exchange, paid $335,000 for his seat. Grandfather Joseph S. Stout paid $5,000 for his seat in 1872, four years after seats became salable. In 1871 a seat went for $2,750. Four Stouts have been members, Joseph S. from 1872 to 1904, Andrew Varick from 1899 until 1017, and his two sons Gardner D. and Andrew Varick Jr., now members.