Business & Finance: Barterer

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When the War was over, Bertram Coles Neidecker, tall, slim son of a Brooklyn realtor, quit the U. S. Air Corps and joined Herbert Clark Hoover's relief mission to the starving Poles. He married a Pole, Sybil, daughter of Maurice Washington Kozminski of the French Line, and set himself up in Coblenz as a money changer to confused U. S. soldiers in the Army of Occupation. Later he moved to Paris, opened a Travelers Bank a few doors from Morgan et Cie. By 1928 Banker Neidecker had bought a yacht, put his bank in larger quarters in the Rue de la Paix, where junketing U. S. citizens liked to watch quotations from the New York Stock exchange click up on his big board. For the investment business Banker Neidecker founded Neidecker et Cie. with branches at Geneva, Brussels, London, Buenos Aires. Manhattan correspondent for Travelers Bank is E. F. Hutton & Co. Last April Banker Neidecker and his Travelers Bank were listed among Senator Peter Norbeck's big bad bears.

Depression hurt money-changing, so 35-year-old Banker Neidecker turned to goods and produce. Last year he bargained for Farm Board wheat to be delivered to his European cartel. Last month he announced the formation of International Commodities Trading Corp., Swiss-chartered, to barter among countries commercially hobbled by foreign exchange restrictions. Last week he concluded his first deal—an agreement to trade 1,000,000 bushels of U. S. wheat and a small amount of cotton for some $500,000 worth of Indo-China zinc and tin. The wheat will be traded on a basis of 50¢ a bushel at Chicago.

In Paris Barterer Neidecker said an initial credit of $4,500,000 had been granted his trading corporation. Where possible or profitable, stocks & bonds will be used as exchange media. Because barter transactions are often tariff-free. Barterer Neidecker hopes to see his company become a powerful factor in intergovernmental tariff negotiations. He is now negotiating for a barter of 200,000 tons of Chilean nitrate for U. S. gasoline, has his eye on unwieldy stocks of Brazilian coffee, Japanese silk.