Scot in Wall Street

A Damoclean dagger rather than sword are the $1,420,000,000 worth of U. S. stocks and bonds held by Allied investors. Their value is less than 2% of that of all securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange. But under the imminent and certain threat of World War II, the hair that held this dagger over U. S. securities markets looked scarily tenuous to market men. If French and British investors had sold their holdings in a panicky rush for dollars, the dagger would have dropped on an already queasy market, drawn real blood.

So it was that the market breathed easier in late August when Britain forced its nationals (holders of better than half of the Allied hoard) to register their U. S. securities, sell them only with Government permission. Last week it breathed still more freely when Britain announced that Scot Securities Tycoon T. J. Carlyle Gilford was in Manhattan to handle the orderly liquidation of British holdings.

No nervous Nellie to be panicked into witless sales is tweedy, fiftyish Scot Gifford, Edinburgh solicitor, chairman of eight British investment trusts, director of 22 British companies. Nor will he be a sucker for casual Wall Street advice. Twenty-five percent of the investment portfolios of many British investment trusts is in U. S. securities, and Scot Gifford has long known his way around the Street as well as around the City.

To stock their man's first showcase, the British Government requisitioned outright all British holdings in 60 U. S. stocks. To His Majesty's subjects His Majesty's Government will pay the market price of their securities as of Feb. 17 in sterling. As Scot Gifford sells them here, the British Government will pocket its dollars for future U. S. material purchases, will thus have added to its present hoard of $2,600,000,000 in liquid gold and dollars. On Solicitor Gifford's first list were equities in plenty of profitable U. S. industries --Du Pont, Douglas Aircraft, American Tobacco, Santa Fe, Norfolk & Western, Colgate-Palmolive-Peet. Last week many a hungry broker hoped he would be tapped for help, get a fat commission in their sale. But who would be tapped, what commission would be paid, how rapidly the first block of equities would be sold, few in Wall Street knew, if any knew at all. Mr. Gifford was as hard to find as a sliced brassie shot on a Scottish moor. In Manhattan for a month before his appointment was announced, he had been seen by partners of J. P. Morgan & Co., few others.

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