Speculation | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Nov 13, 1879

Speculation.

The San Francisco Alta says, on the "Science of Manipulation":—

"Probably one silver mine in one hundred opened in Nevada, at a cost of $10,000 or more, has paid a dividend; one of 500 has paid more than has been expended on it. Assuming that these figures are correct, the stockholders have suffered in 499 cases, though probably in at least 300 of these cases the trustees, or some of them, make profits by selling stock more than sufficient to pay all assessments upon their shares. They acted in accordance with common custom in their line of business when they took advantage of the information which came to them exclusively in consequence of their position, and bought or sold without letting the stockholders or general public know what they were doing.

"This system may be entirely satisfactory to the insider, but is detrimental to genuine mining enterprise. The directors who look to the 'manipulation'—that's the genteel word—of the stock, keep on at work expending large sums without caring much whether there is any good prospect of finding ore or not; and, as a matter of fact, not less than $75,000,000 collected by assessments in San Francisco within the last seventeen years, have been expended in places where economical mine managers would not have spent a cent."

These are well-known facts, and yet buying stocks is one of the commonest methods of throwing away money in San Francisco, even by poor people who need the money thus wasted.