Phil Cone smiled sheepishly. "Oh, I wouldn't say that, Winnie. We can
cash in but we'll have to step out of our field. We could shift a
million dollars to Canada. You can get a Canadian dollar for ninety
cents American. A year from now it will be back to par. That's better
than ten percent on your money in less than a year."
"What about South America?" I asked.
"Lay off the Latins, Winnie," Wasson advised me. "Brazil's the only
country in South America that's good for the long pull and just now is
no time to monkey with Brazil. They've got some politics just now."
I considered things a bit. "Let's see if we can figure out a way to
make a quick killing," I said. "Suppose, for example, something drastic
happened--like Roosevelt dying on one of his plane-trips--to mark the
end of some of these controls. What would happen to the market?"
Wasson chuckled. "If that guy popped off, there'd be dancing in Wall
Street and you'd have to shut down the Exchange because the ticker
couldn't keep up with the buying orders. Prices would go higher than
the Empire State Building. Hell! They'd hit the stratosphere."
"Is that your opinion, Phil?" I asked.
Cone shook his head. "Only a few suckers would feel like that, Winnie,"
he told me. "The big-time operators would be shivering in their boots.
As long as F.D.R. is in the White House there's no limit to what they
can make out of the war. If Roosevelt died now, you'd see the bottom
drop out of the market and the damndest wave of labor strikes we've had
since 1890."
"Damn it, Phil," I objected. "I wish you and Graham would get together
on this one. I can't quite follow all your ideas. Business conditions
and war-orders would continue, wouldn't they?"
Cone shook his head again. "No," he insisted. "The business community's
got confidence in Roosevelt. Sure he's a tough baby, sure he's got a
lot of dumb Harvard men sore at him, sure he's got the labor leaders
_and_ the G.I.'s rooting for him. But he's done a good job with the
war, he's let people make money and some of his best friends are
multi-millionaires, like Astor and Harriman. If he was to die, we'd
have this Missouri guy--whatsisname? Truman?--and what can he offer?"
"Got any comment on that, Graham?" I asked.
"The way Phil puts it, it sounds reasonable," Wasson admitted, "but
I still say that the first reaction to anything like that would be a
buying wave which would send the market way up."
I considered for a couple of minutes. "I can't say I agree with you,"
I said at last. "The big boys wouldn't let that happen any more than
they'd let a peace-scare knock the bottom out of the market. What would
labor and the G. I.'s think and do if they read that the Stock Market
quotations went over the top at a thing like that."
"Well, Winnie," Cone observed. "It isn't likely to happen."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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