Word: sweringen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fine fettle last week was Senator Burton Kendall Wheeler, acrid chairman of the Senate committee investigating railroad finance. Fortnight ago the Senator unearthed amid the yellowing records of the Van Sweringen empire and the dust bins of Guaranty Co. history one gem of purest ray serene. This was a memorandum written in 1930 by John Minor Botts Hoxsey, listing expert of the New York Stock Exchange, warning that "public protest" would follow the multiplication of such corporations as the Van Sweringen holding companies, for which Guaranty Co. underwrote and the Stock Exchange approved an ill-fated $30,000,000 bond...
...type of holding company then blossoming in utilities and later exemplified in railroading by the Van Sweringen companies, Mr. Hoxsey had described in his memorandum as "necessarily bad ... a mere exploitation of what may be termed the surplus earnings of the operating companies during periods of prosperity ... a temptation to rape the subsidiaries for the benefit of the holding company." Senator Wheeler read aloud Mr. Hoxsey's reasons for the indictment of such companies: "Financially and economically, because a small and normal variation in the rate of return on the property of the operating subsidiaries makes a large...
Opening his show with a public dissection of the Van Sweringen railroad pyramid, the Senator at first plugged the theme: how little the Cleveland bachelors owned, how much they controlled. His star witness was George Alexander Ball, whose name is a household word to millions of farmers' wives who put up their preserves in his "Ball Perfect Mason" jars. Mr. Ball, a pale, grey-mustached septuagenarian with a frosty fringe around his bald cranium, told how he and Cleveland's George Ashley Tomlinson, to whom the late O. P. Van Sweringen appealed for aid in 1935, formed Midamerica...
...think Houdini could have done anything more phenomenal than the Van Sweringens did," scoffed Senator Wheeler. "They regained control of their vast empire without putting up a five-cent piece." Mr. Ball, unexpected inheritor of the Van Sweringen empire, had to confess time & again that he did not even know what kind of business many of the 286 Van Sweringen corporations were engaged in. He had put its management in the hands of Herbert Fitzpatrick, Van Sweringen attorney...
...insurance stocks to a company managed by Equity, and the proceeds were used to buy control of Equity. Thus, a $13,000 cash buy into Consolidated Funds plus Equity's own money put Mr. Milton into Equity. Said Lawyer Schenker: ''[It's] a Van Sweringen operation in the investment trust field." After detailing various operations of Equity Corp., Mr. Schenker drew from Mr. Milton testimony about the formation of Merton Shares, a Canadian corporation, asked him why he had gone to Canada to insure success in a U. S. transaction. Apologized Mr. Milton...