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Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Chapter XXII
One day Jim Barnes, who not only was one of my principal brokers but an intimate
friend as well, called on me. He said he wanted me to do him a great favour. He never
before had talked that way, and so I asked him to tell me what the favour was, hoping it
was something I could do, for I certainly wished to oblige him. He then told me that his
firm was interested in a certain stock; in fact, they had been the principal promoters of
the company and had placed the greater part of the stock. Circumstances had arisen that
made it imperative for them to market a rather large block. Jim wanted me to undertake
to do the marketing for him. The stock was Consolidated Stove.
I did not wish to have anything to do with it for various reasons. But Barnes, to whom I
was under some obligations, insisted on the personal-favour phase of the matter, which
alone could overcome my objections. He was a good fellow, a friend, and his firm, I
gathered, was pretty heavily involved, so in the end I consented to do what I could.
It has always seemed to me that the most picturesque point of difference between the
war boom and other booms was the part that was played by a type new in stock-market
affairs the boy banker.
The boom was stupendous and its origins and causes were plainly to be grasped by all.
But at the same time the greatest banks and trust companies in the country certainly did
all they could to help make millionaires overnight of all sorts and conditions of
promoters and munition makers. It got so that all a man had to do was to say that he had
a friend who was a friend of a member of one of the Allied commissions and he would
be offered all the capital needed to carry out the contracts he had not yet secured. I used
to hear incredible stories of clerks becoming presidents of companies doing a business
of millions of dollars on money borrowed from trusting trust companies, and of
contracts that left a trail of profits as they passed from man to man. A flood of gold was
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