BYE BABY BANKING

That the astute gentlemen who represent American High Finance find themselves increasingly subject to dizziness, fainting spells, and insomnia is certainly no cause for wonder. Nor will Pepso, Postum, or Sanka afford them any relief, for down in Washington the realistically-minded Mr. Pecora continues to dissect, with gusto, their jowly leaders, and after every such operation their brains are freighted with dismal adumbrations.

A new development which has raised gooseflesh on the sensitive epidermis of these moguls is the news that the government will subpoena forty bank presidents so that they may shed some verbal illumination on their financial practices. An added horror was lent to the announcement, when the financiers beheld their fellow martyr, Mr. Harvey L. Carke, most unwillingly damning himself by his own testimony, and when they shudderingly recollected the amazing confessions dragged from Mr. Wiggin and Mr. Morgan on the same stand. While Mr. Clarke could not compare with Mr. Wiggin in the variety and scale of his operations he nevertheless did quite well in his own small way. In 1929 the genial Harvey organized the General Theatres Equipment, Inc., to take over the business of six subsidiaries. The book value of the stock of the six companies was $4,759,000. Mr. Clarke felt this to be insufficient and naively marked it up to $43,044,000, which netted for him and his associates a profit of almost $38,000,000. This was nothing to boast about to Mr. Wiggin with his many millions of profits made by selling the stock of his own bank short, but it was, after all, pretty good for a little feller. And if the great Wiggin maintained three dummy corporations in Canada for tax evasion purposes, Mr. Clarke could claim to have exceeded him in ethical myopia by deliberately perjuring himself on the witness stand.

This revelation of the American banker as a Machiavellian combination of incompetence and dishonesty is shocking, but not unexpected. There is, however, nothing to be gained by heaping contumely on the heads of these men as they don sackcloth and ashes; distrusted by the public, assailed by the government, they are only able to emit feeble chirps about individualism. Rather is this the time for remedial legislation.