Investment Bankers

The 1,200 gentlemen who marketed four-fifths of the $7,500,000,000 corporation and government securities placed in the U. S. during 1925, met at Quebec last week as the Investment Bankers Association. They gathered as much for mutual acquaintance as for conference on their peculiar problems. Investment banking has grown to be of vast complexity, and depends much upon personal relations. Issuing houses buy bonds wholesale, which they job to their retail correspondents. These in turn sell such securities directly to investors.

The convention made no decisions of far-reaching import. The members, most of them in their 30's, many of them sober, listening to the convention speeches at the Chateau Frontenac, heard:

Foreign holdings now owned in the U. S. total $11,000,000,000. In 1914 such holdings were $1,500,000,000.

German private and public borrowings in the U. S. now reach almost $1,000,000,000.

Before the War U. S. investors placed most of their foreign money in Canada, Mexico and Cuba. Now money goes chiefly to Europe.

On the New York Stock Exchange scarcely a dozen foreign issues were listed in 1913. Today there are 145.

Several cities in Washington have defaulted on their bonds. Now no one buys their new issues.

Retail bondmen complained of the small percentage of a security's selling price that they must work on. They blamed the issuing houses; Jerome J. Hanauer, of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., new governor in the association, blamed the situation on corporations and governments which demand too high prices for their bonds.

Pliny Jewell of Coffin and Burr Inc., Boston, was chosen association president to succeed Ray Morris of Brown Brothers & Co., Manhattan.