Modern Stockbrokers versus Olden Days Ones

Are you a modern stockbroker? You don't know anything about stockbroking!

I met J. Paul Getty on the steps outside the front of Raffles Hotel in Singapore when I was 10 years old – 1968. Have I told this story before? Probably...

When I read his book “As I See It” almost twenty years later I couldn't get why my father claimed not to have liked Getty. Getty I recall caused quite a stir when, following introductions to the Sultan's education fund from Shell Far East and Burma Oil executives, the Getty organisation donated US$50 (and $15 personally from Getty himself) to the Malayan government education and library reconstruction fund accompanied with a letter saying how proud his organisation was to have been able to sponsor the fund and that were it to sponsor every meritorious applicant that approached his organisation every year he would go rapidly broke. My father I know thought it was something of an insult, but I had my doubts he was reading things correctly, and later on I thought Getty was being as generous as he could possibly have been given all of the surrounding circumstances.

People want, some need, and lots seek, – money, all the time.

Standard stockbrokers promote this myth about themselves that they raise money and capital for new enterprise and development and research. They don't. Getty would have told you that and in the latter part of his life, he was the world's richest man and was in a position to know so categorically. Worse still, he recounts the story of how the only broker who ever assisted him was E. F. Hutton, who, during the Depression, at least held onto his 'nearly worthless' stock and stuck it 'in the bottom drawer' instead of selling it all up like they mostly all always do. And by this act of consideration Getty was not as severely damaged as he otherwise might have been and was thereby enabled to find a way through.

I tell these kinds of stories because there is much I would like to contribute about raising cash (something I have done a little of) for capital ventures today. Much I am probably not permitted to say, unless asked. I come from an old school. And you would have read me say as much a few times here already and on another board I participate on. Certainly it was well past troubled times, but I was raised to some extent in the Tiffin Room of the Raffles Hotel and in the E & O alongside the remnants of the pre-War luminaries and their children. I lived and breathed with the family remnants of the legendary Sarkies Brothers and the people from out of the Sassoon stockbroking firm. These were real business-people and real money people.

I don't think I'm merely being nostalgic about this: there is something different about the finance business today compared to the past of which I am familiar. And I am talking strictly about the character and style and personalities of the people themselves. Money is never boring. I don't find money boring... It is though if you stick it under the mattress all the time!

; )

Calvin J. Bear