BIGGEST GAMBLING DEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 15, 18 January 1930, Page 9 (Supplement)

BIGGEST GAMBLING DEN.

WALL STREET A WORLDBEATER. AMERICA'S NATIONAL CASINO. £10,000,000,000,0p0 GAMBLED YEARLY' (By a Special Correspondent.) I wonder how many people know where is the biggest gambling den in the whole world. . How often do people read of "Wild Scenes in Wall Street" in the American cables to the newspapers and do not realise that they are reading about the biggest national and legal casino in the world. Tales of fortunes made and lost; of bootblacks becoming, millionaires; of millionaires "going broke" and having to sell their homes; and the like "romances" and tragedies are constant. But there is another side to this great and sensational legalised "casino" of America. In (every part of the great United States are small branches, mostly in hotels and other places of public resort in -constant ( touch with Wall Street, where .clerks of Wall Street; brokers are taking every hour of the day to the great Exchange of New York open "bets" . and wagers to feed the great gambling machine. What* then, is the mystery of this wonder pfflica of; money 1 Actually the best description is that the New York Stock Exchange is the national "casino" of America; the centre of a nation-wide system of gambling bigger than anything else of a gambling nature anywhere else in the world. So highly organised is the system that within a few minutes a gambler, however small' his or her capital, and however remote from New York, can and does invest and "draw" huge profits as easily as does the very broker on the floor of the Stock Exchange itself. Every year something like ten thousand million pounds are'gambled with on the New York Stock Exchange, a colossal figure, in which many more millions of people in all parts of America are concerned for all manner of amounts from a modest one hundred to millions of dollars. ; It is an easy description- to call the New York Stock' Exchange the "Monte Carlo" of the United States. The system is as amazing as the use to which it is put. , . ~ ~ . , _ * , , , Every Hotel a "Betting" Branch. Every decent-sized hotel in the States has its New York Stock Exchange branch. In a special room or the lobby a Stock Exchange board is displayed, on which every few minutes the very latest news from the centre is inscribed from tape machines operated'by electric telegraph from the very floor of the building in Wall Street. Visitors and "locals" gather round these boards, and according to the "news" they telegraph their orders, which are nothing more or less than "bets" risked on the movements of prices of shares.

Nowhere else in the world is there such a system of gambling, in. stocks and shares in companies about which the gamblers for the most part know little or nothing. Something like 10,000,000 shares are bought and sold daily in this huge gambling market. Many win and many lose. A.man is. often in the position of being a bootblack or hotel porter one day,and within a week of wild speculation will be' owner-of his own hotel and driving about in a luxurious car. A millionaire of : to-day will be homeless and poverty-stricken. next week. For the national gamblers of America in this gigantic "casino" play not gently or with caution; when the frenzy is on it is always a case of all or nothing—and some must, lose< to make others win. The annual amount paid out in dividends ly, the industries and other commercial enterprises represented on the | "gaming boards" of Wall Street runs to an average "of ' £750,000,000, and represent an output of stock worth about £15,000,000,000 yearly. Can you visualise the huge possibilities for gambling such ventures can provide? It is the brokers of Wall Street who have set up the elaborate machinery that reaches out to all those hotel "branches" throughout the States where the mass/of the people gamble in comfort, but not' so much in peace, for the excitement • evinced over the latest quotations flashed on to the local agents' "boards" are watched with all the excitement that the rest of the world watches for the result of "The Derby" every year. V hi Feeding the Instinct. The brokers, provide amazingly luxurious and complete accommodation at these branches for their clients. Local offices are to be found close to the "prices boards" in all the hotels which are replete with every luxury. Not even a Continental casino makes gambling so easy and luxurious. Lounges and easy chairs are there with bulletin board in full view, so that visitors can watch the progress of the Wall Street transactions just as -they occur while partaking of afternoon tea or other refreshment. 1 „ ' ■ ; \ And the brokers' agents are on duty ready to take any orders for any amount 'to buy and sell anything in the way of shares. These agents are in constant touch with their head office in Wall Street, and a transaction put through 500 miles away from New York can be completed in a few minutes. Within a very short while afterwards the gambler will know just how his newlybought shares are faring, and whether he is standing to win or lose, and how much. ■ ' , f?

The bulletins come from New York to all these thousands of branches minute by minute over specially operated wires controlled by the Wall Street brokers. America may have passed prohibition of liquor, but never in its greatest popularity did drink hold the nation so tightly in its spell and clutches as does the gambling in stocks and shares that makes Wall Street the greatest "Monte Carlo" that man could ever conceive in his wildest imagination. So great a hold has this gambling got on the people that they pay something like £20,000,000 a year in commission to brokers to transact their business of "betting on the bulletin." It is a wonderful commentary on the gambling instinct in humans.