Stockbroker Abroad

In Milan last week Italy's General Bankers Confederation cheered a typical and popular U. S. stockbroker, a genial fellow of 54, who, with his young wife, lately honeymooned in Honolulu: Edward Henry Harriman Simmons, retiring president of the New York Stock Exchange.*

The Italian bankers knew that Mr. Simmons had been received in private audience by their King (TIME, April 7), had been afforded every courtesy by Il Duce. They expected him to say something courteous in return. He doubled, tripled their expectations.

"The whole American people is becoming accustomed to eat Italian food ..." cried Mr. Simmons with one of the dramatic gestures he makes with upraised arm and half-clenched fist.

"It would be a real loss to the world," he continued, "should Italy endeavor, by inaugurating machine production ... to eliminate individual craftsmanship ... to do away with her Venetian glass or lace ... her extraordinarily fine leather and stone or wood work." The "whole Ameri can people," he insisted, is "furnish [ing] its homes with furniture of Italian make or design." Indeed, "If we [Americans] wish to study the European backgrounds of the American people of 1930, it is no longer sufficient for us simply to visit England -- we must make a trip to Italy as well/-

Turning to Italian politics, Mr. Sim mons chiefly praised the Mussolini regime for stamping out "Communism -- that evil disease from the Orient."**

Getting down at last to business the President of the New York Stock Exchange gave Italian tycoons who may want to list securities in Manhattan, some advice, crisp, correct, straightforward:

"Over the past hundred years, the New York securities market has developed a quite strict and complicated technique for handling American securities. As a result, when our market is called upon to handle foreign securities, we must naturally be at least as strict with them as with our own issues. This fact is not always appreciated abroad. Sometimes, for example, people in Europe think the American demand for all kinds of company statistics is unreasonable and excessive, until they realize that this is something which we regularly require of our own companies. . . .

"Unfortunately, most of the guidebooks for tourists in Italy, which tell us so much about your wonderful old palaces and historical monuments, do not inform us with equal care concerning these very significant economic accomplishments of recent years. I hope, however, that the admission to the New York Stock Exchange of Italian securities like Pirelli, Montecatini, Italian Edison, Fiat, Agriatica, Meridionale and others, will assist in giving our people a better balanced conception of modern Italy, particularly in respect to its vigorous economic development."

*Nominated last week to succeed him: Richard Whitney

/- This was Mr. Simmons' first visit to Italy.

**No Oriental state is Communist. The focus of Communism is in European, not Asiatic Russia. Marx and Lenin, chief architects of Communism, were born respectively in Prussia and European Russia.

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