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APPENDIX 
as far as the Clearing Corporation was concerned, it showed itself 
extraordinarily able to handle the huge volume of business imposed 
upon it. But the confusion on the floor of the Exchange in regard to 
‘he identity of other parties to many contracts, prevented Exchange 
firms from making out promptly and accurately the ordinary docu- 
ments necessary for the Clearing Corporation to perform its work. 
A stock clearing house, of course, resembles a bank clearing house 
in that all its items must balance. When many Exchange firms could 
not for the time being state with what other firms they had dealt, there 
was danger that the Clearing Corporation could not perform its ordi- 
nary and most necessary work. 
The Clearing Corporation, in addition to stimulating houses whose 
delays were holding up the whole community, itself stepped into the 
breach by creating a special account upon which, as it happened, my 
own name was by agreement placed. Through this account were put 
the various contracts on which the second name was lacking. Still 
later the Clearing Corporation directly accepted delivery of stock on 
all such contracts itself, thus vastly relieving this problem. At the 
peak load, the Clearing Corporation took in from the member firms 
many thousand shares of stock, and paid out thereupon several millions 
of dollars. It is very creditable both to the Clearing Corporation and 
to the Exchange firms that this whole tangle was ultimately un- 
raveled without any loss therefrom to the Stock Clearing Corporation. 
The Clearing Corporation also performed a valuable service to the 
financial community in undertaking even in the midst of the panic 
a clearance of bonds, for at this time stock market fluctuations had 
rendered certain convertible bond issues—particularly that of the 
A. T. & T.—very active and contracts in them were becoming seri- 
ously congested.” 
CHAPTER XIII 
Security Delivery and Transfer 
(XIIIa) The office-to-office delivery of securities between New 
York Stock Exchange members was the custom of the New York 
stock market from its earliest days until very recently. The long 
adherence to this wasteful and uneconomic system of decentralized 
security deliveries may be attributed in part to the less deliverable 
character of American registered shares, as compared with French or 
German bearer shares, and also perhaps to the contagious direct delivery 
practice of the London Stock Exchange. In 1913-14 Mr. S. F. Streit 
then a Governor of the New York Stock Exchange and later President