Golden Rays

Rayon (artificial silk*) means ray in French. Last week, Courtaulds, Ltd./- world's largest rayon manufacturers, estimated to control 80% of the world's trade, declared a 100% stock dividend, nominally worth -L-12,000,000 and a 25% cash dividend, tax free, for the year.

The London Stock exchange, since the boom of seven years ago, has been as quiet as an untenanted playhouse. The rayon announcement pierced the gloomy hush like a spotlight lighting its stage for the premiere of an exciting play. The scene on the stage was an alley in the City of London, Throgmorton Street. Hustling onto this stage from every entrance came a mob of stockbrokers, those frantic and mysterious vaudevillians, shouting the abandoned gibberish of their lines.

The rayon announcement was made after the end of the stock market day in London; the next morning, before the Exchange opened (the London outdoor curb market keeps the hours it pleases), the curb brokers on Throgmorton Street, unshaven and madly perturbed, bid the shares up from a little above -L-7 to well above -L-9. When the clock in Capel Court, a few blocks away from Throgmorton Street over the low City roofs, struck its nine slow bells, the sun slanted a bright beam into Throgmorton Street and the official Exchange opened. Here, the bidding corrected the excesses that the curb market had already effected; nonetheless, at the close of business, Courtaulds Shares and, by sympathy, the stocks of other artificial silk firms, had soared to new high levels. There was a huge crowd milling and shouting in the alleys of the City; nothing like it had been seen since the Kaffir boom in the nineties.

In New York, the effect of the Courtaulds melon was less extravagant. On the Curb Exchange, Courtaulds rose from 38 1/2 to 42 1/2; the next day was a U. S. holiday so that Manhattan brokers could sit and watch the play that was going on in Throgmorton Street. They whispered their applause over whiskey and soda; then, on the next morning, they took their profits from the rise.

*It was invented forty years ago by a French nobleman, Count de Chardonnet. Practically any cellulose substance can be transformed into it,--cotton linters (tiny shreds of cotton fibre formerly wasted), wood pulp, corn stalks, straw, etc.

/-Samuel Augustine Courtauld, philanthropist, publisher of Odes and Epodes of Horace in translation.