A BIG BANKRUPTCY.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 228, 26 September 1929, Page 6

A BIG BANKRUPTCY.

j The "Financial Times" estimates tliat "the liabilities of the Hatry Companies are unlikely to exceed £20,000,000." These figures may help to explain the extremely disturbing effect that the Hatry collapse has produced on the Stock Exchange and in the Money Market. The financial history of the nineteenth century supplies several parallel cases. The failure J Overend, Gurney and Company in ISGG, and the collapse of Baring Brothers in 1890, were in reality far more serious disasters than this. For though Overends showed liabilities of only £5,000,000 and Barings owed £20,000,000,1 neither the Money Market nor the general public were so well protected against risks or so well prepared to meet great emergencies as they are to-day. It is true that such modem devices as interlocking companies tend to spread financial risks, but in so doing they distribute them over a wider area and divide both responsibilities and losses. No doubt the Hatry failure will earn for. itself unenviable notoriety in the annals of modern finance, but it is not likely to be associated with any such disasters as made the names of Overend and Baring words of evil omen in the nineteenth century Money Market.