First Is Last

The New York Curb Exchange last week lost the first paid president it ever had. It will not get another-at least not for a good long while. Main reason (outside of "economy"'): burly, eupeptic Banker George Peters Rea, 47, has done such a good job that there is virtually no need for a full-time successor, unless & until the biggest job of all-more business-is licked. And it takes more than a paid president to increase trading in stocks & bonds.

When George Rea left the presidency of the Bishop National Bank of Honolulu four years ago to head the Curb, business was terrible and so was the financial condition of the Curb. As he leaves, business is worse (59,600 shares a day v. 130,000 in the first half of 1939), but the Curb as an institution is now eminently solvent, with enough cash to cover its $730,000 mortgage. Annual expenses have been pared more than $400,000. Last year the Curb earned $57,311 before depreciation, v. a $42,285 loss for the Big Board; in 1940 the Curb cleared $5,513, while the Stock Exchange lost a whopping $275,302.

An implacable SEC-hater (he likes to call SEC treatment of Wall Street "mental cruelty"), Banker Rea nonetheless was ahead of the more appeasement-minded Stock Exchange on reforms in line with SEC notions of how an exchange should be run-notably on promptly publicizing and summarily punishing violators of Exchange rules (including a former Curb governor). The Curb also took the lead in buying in Exchange memberships, to give the remaining members a bigger share of what business was left. Already 50 seats (10% of total membership) have been bought out and retired.

Rea's nonpaid successor at the Curb is Curb Chairman Fred Gushing Moffatt, whose longtime brokerage business has earned him enough so that he can afford to work for nothing for a while.

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