APPENDIX 
6501 
would be sent to his office and reported to the customer. This plan 
did well enough in dull markets, but when the floor member was 
already busily engaged in executing actual orders he would be forced 
to delay in obtaining quotations in this way. In the very active 1928 
markets, it became practically impossible for this reason to furnish 
prompt and accurate floor quotations. Yet the fact that the stock 
ticker often was running “behind the market” only increased the 
demand for them. The Committee of Arrangements took this prob- 
lem firmly in hand, and on October 1, 1928, inaugurated as a solution 
to it the present highly satisfactory telephone quotation system. At 
each trading post on the floor a telephone quotation station was in- 
stalled in charge of clerks who, as market prices change, telephone 
bid and offer quotations for the securities listed at that post by private 
wire to the operators at quotation desks in a newly established central 
quotation room in the upper stories of the Stock Exchange building. 
These quotation desks are connected by telephone wires through switch- 
boards to the order rooms of Stock Exchange offices in New York. 
By means of this system, a Stock Exchange office desiring bid and 
offer quotations can call from its order room to the operator in the 
central quotation room who is in contact with the floor quotation clerk 
at the particular post where the given issue is listed. In this way, 
Stock Exchange firms can ascertain bid and offer quotations speedily 
and accurately. 
CHAPTER VII 
Credit Transactions in Securities 
(VIIa) The complete collapse and destruction of certain East 
European currencies after the war temporarily compelled a reversion 
to the primitive practice of bartering goods against goods without 
the use of money. When, for example, the old Austrian krone became 
worthless in foreign countries, Austrian manufacturers could not ob- 
tain needed raw materials from outside nations except by payment in 
terms of the goods which they proposed to manufacture. Austrian 
textile manufacturers would thus turn into cloth the bales of cotton 
furnished to them by English exporting houses, pay off the latter for 
the raw cotton with part of the goods manufactured, and earn other 
expenses and profits by selling the remainder of the cloth. Similar 
transactions occurred in Germany, Russia and other countries whose 
currency had been hopelessly inflated. Such reversions to barter of 
course illustrate how basic barter is to trade, and how fundamental 
are the situations where debts are contracted and paid in terms of 
roods rather than in terms of money.