Prosperous Approach

More social, more sophisticated than most U. S. businessmen's conventions is the annual meeting of the Investment Bankers Association of America. Last week for their 24th such gathering, the decorous IBA delegates spent five pleasant days at White Sulphur Springs, W. Va.

No less well-mannered in public function than in private fun, IBA meetings are never ruffled by the political storms that sweep the U. S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association. Protests against unbalanced budgets and rising taxes last week were sounded not as bristling pronunciamentos but as pious hopes. Guest speakers occasionally thundered against the New Deal but, whatever they might have said over their highballs, IBA members accepted legislation like the Securities Act and the Public Utility Act with a brave show of public stoicism.

"As I look ahead into the coming year," said retiring IBA President Ralph T. Crane of Brown Harriman & Co., "I cannot help but feel that we are approaching another very prosperous period in our history. . . . Let us all profit by the mistakes of the past and so regulate our business that when the next depression comes--as it will--we will not have to apologize for or explain our actions."

Most forthright speech at White Sulphur was made by Sidney J. Weinberg, able little Goldman, Sachs & Co. partner and head of the IBA committee on industrial securities. Indeed, many a banker thought that the Weinberg report should have been reserved for private consumption. Mr. Weinberg sharply warned his fellow bankers that in the current competition for new business they were slipping into the old habit of letting corporations drive too stiff a bargain for the money they were borrowing. Sinking funds were often inadequate, call prices too low. But, worst of all, they were pricing some of their offerings so high that the securities promptly declined to their true value as soon as they were issued.

Named as IBA president for the coming year was Orrin G. Wood of Boston's Estabrook & Co. Father of six children, Banker Wood last year wrote the secretary of his Harvard Class of 1909: "I have been connected with a number of corporations, all of which pay their bills and some of which, though this must be said with shame, still pay their stockholders a meagre dividend."

For financial newshawks the IBA is a choice assignment. No less than 33 covered this year's meeting -- about one for every 25 bankers. All belong to or are initiated into the Order of Jim Daisy, a group of reporters who attend IBA meetings every year. Last week after initiating SECounsel John J. Burns and eight other "ornery" members, the Order of Jim Daisy formally elected Norman Stabler, financial editor of the New York Herald Tribune, to be Grand Androescium for 1936.

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