Business & Finance: Personnel: Jan. 28, 1935

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Last week the following were news:

At the age of 18 months, lusty, Boston-born Leon Fraser was adopted by a wealthy couple named Bonar. At 20 he flunked out of Columbia University, returned the next year to win every money prize offered for scholarship. A lawyer by training, he had never worked in a bank that received or paid out cash when, at 43, he was elected president of the Bank for International Settlements. B. I. S., known as the "Bank without a Vault,"* had been handling Reparations payments under the Young Plan. When the Young Plan payments were stopped by President Hoover's moratorium, Banker Fraser helped develop a profitable sideline in League of Nations loans and transfers among European banks. Last week President Fraser, deaf to all pleas from his B. I. S. associates, announced that he would not be a candidate for reelection when his term expires next May. Observers anticipated that since B. I. S. was originally founded to promote the gold standard which the U. S. has now abandoned, Mr. Fraser's successor would be chosen from the gold bloc.

Last year Maryland Casualty Co. of Baltimore borrowed $17,500,000 from the RFC, RFChairman Jesse Jones promptly installed two government executives as vice presidents to represent RFC's interest. Last week Maryland Casualty, presumably at Jesse Jones's behest, announced the election of ten new directors, nearly all of them nationally known. Among the ten were Maryland's onetime Governor Albert Cabell Ritchie; onetime FDI Chairman Walter Joseph Cummingst now chairman of Chicago's Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co.; President Ellery W, Mann of Zonite Products Corp.; Vice Chairman Samuel Clay Williams of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

President Richard Whitney of the New York Stock Exchange was re-elected vice president and director of the State Bank of Apopka, Fla. (pop. 1,134).