INVESTMENT: Point Five

After thinking over President Truman’s Point Four program for backward nations, New York Stock Exchange President Emil Schram spotted a big flaw in the idea. Point Four would wrap a protective government guarantee around private funds invested outside the U.S. What irked Schram was that there was no program for improving “the shabby treatment of capital at home.”

The Point Four program by itself, said Schram, “is unsound and illogical” because “it sings the virtues of new investments so long as they are made outside the U.S.” What’s needed, said he, is a Point Five—”tax changes that will apply the principles of a ‘bold new program’ . . . both here and abroad.”

“I would like nothing better than to [find] on the New York Stock Exchange [securities] of waterworks in South America, electric light and power companies in the Middle East. [But] how can we expect [others] to amend their [restrictive] laws toward American capital, knowing that investment and investors at home are discriminated against and discouraged?”