588 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



ing business as it has not been taken care of before, and stop this demand 

 for liquidation at times when it is hardest to liquidate — liquidation is al- 

 ways demanded at a time you do not want to liquidate. Have you ever 

 noticed that, you older men and younger men? Why? Because that is 

 the time that the bank is having demand for their stocks, and that is the 

 time that they make demand on you to pay your notes if you possibly can, 

 and that is what creates the trouble. If we can take Iowa farm paper and 

 put it in the investment field we have done a great service for this state. 

 Remember these few points: You cannot liquidate Iowa farm indebted- 

 ness on quick assets; second, you must get out of the commercial banking 

 field in this state with a large volume of the farm paper which belongs 

 in the investment field; and, third, to try to create in this state a market 

 for good, sound investment paper to take care of this everlasting flow of 

 money going out of Iowa for investment. At the present time there are 

 21 men working in this state, as we are sitting here, selling securities to 

 Iowa people from outside of the state, even as hard up as we are, and 

 you would be surprised if you have any knowledge of it how fertile a field 

 Iowa is considered. One corporation in this state selling securities from 

 outside of the state has eleven branch oflices in Iowa and around fifty-six 

 or fifty-seven men working in the state. Another large corporation from 

 New York has a large branch oflice in this state with eighteen men work- 

 ing all the time. In February of last year there was an issue of one billion 

 dollars of government bonds brought out, and the manager of one of these 

 officers told me that their institution had sold three million dollars' worth 

 of Belgian government bonds in the eastern part of the state in two weeks. 

 We bankers know that every week large quantities of money go out of the 

 state for investment, and the sad part of it is that we haven't had the 

 sense to try to direct that investment into proper channels. It has always 

 been the idea of the banker to keep all of the money in the bank that he 

 could, and if a man came to him and said, "I have two or three thousand 

 dollars on deposit with you and I want to ask your advice about such-and- 

 such an investment," and you give him the time-worn advice, "You may 

 want to use it in three or four months, and if you invest it you won't have 

 it," and many a time we chuckle to ourselves with the thought that we 

 had changed his mind, but in two or three weeks we get a check back for 

 some Texas old stock, a California fruit ranch, or some other equally dis- 

 tant place, and then the saddest thing is that the money he sent out there 

 very seldom finds its way back. We bankers are going to get some sense 

 in this matter as well as the farmers, because it is a mighty dull man that 

 doesn't get some really constructive ideas out of a thing like this, and we 

 are going to do something to help our customers invest their money 

 wisely, and that will make a market for the paper we put out. We haven't 

 in the past had any real good paper to present to our customers, except 

 farm mortgages and county bonds, and they are in such form as not to be 

 suitable as to length of time. We will make loans for ninety days, four, 

 six, nine months or a year; we will sell debentures for the same length of 

 time. We will have a first mortgage department which will take care of 

 farm loans for five and ten-year periods, so that we will be able to take 

 care of an Iowa investor from $100 up, and for any time from three months 



