STRANGE REVELATIONS.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2510, 11 August 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

STRANGE REVELATIONS.

Some rather astonishing are made in a book just published entitled " The Art of Investing," by " A New York Broker." The advice this New York broker gives is all of the negative kind, and in the way of cautions. Except the Government obligations, which are now practically unobtainable, everything else on the American market is rotten or liable to become so very suddenly. Such things as waterworks loans, for example, which in England are eagerly sought after for investments, paying 011 present prices little more than New Consols, are in America subject to great risk from frauds practised bythe projectors. Nowhere else is cheap construction (of underground pipes) so easy to effect and so difficult to detect " Five or six years is the limit to the probable use assigned by engineers to pipes and other materials in works that the writer knows of that are covered with mortgages authorising bonds having from 20 to 25 years to run." As to American railroads, they are invariably " over-bonded" to an enormous extent, and as to " farm-mortgages," the degree to which they have been carried iu some States is illustrated by the remark of " one of the natives" of a border community, that " there was not a hencoop in his part of the country that did not have a mortgage on it !'' The account given of the New York Stock Exchange is about the most doleful for investors conceivable.