HUGE LOSSES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 276, 21 November 1932, Page 8

HUGE LOSSES.

OIL KING'S FORTUNE.

ONCE £200,000,000.

NOW LESS THAN FIFTH.

The Rockefeller fortune, held by John D. Rockefeller and his son, John D. Rockefeller, ' jun.,' has been severely affected by the depression, and may now rate as one of the minor large fortunes of the United States, instead of the greatest in the world, in. the opinion of John T. Flynn, economist and biographer of the elder Rockefeller.

! From - a total of 500,000,000d0l to 1,000,000,000, which Mr. Flynn estimates •to -have been the fortune in 1929 after the elder Rockefeller had made gigantic gifts to his chosen philanthropies, it probably "has shrunk now to around 150,000,000d01, he estimated recently.

At its peak, after Mr. Rockefeller had multiplied by wise investment the 200,000,000 fortune with which he retired from active business in 1896, and before he. had embarked, on his career as a great philanthropist, the fortune was about 1,000,000,000d01, in Mr. Flynn's opinion.

Fortune in Securities. "The Rockefeller fortune is in securities," he said, "and of course everyone knows what has happened to securities since the crash ( of 1929."

Mr. Flynn based his estimate of what had happened to the Rockefeller fortune on the list of stocks and bonds which Mr. Rockefeller turned over to the Rockefeller Foundation, his major philan. thropy, and which was published in the foundation's report for 1930. •

"These securities had a total ledger value of 112,199,661d01," Mr. Flynn pointed out. "Their values as given in the report were their cost, and they were never valued at the values of 1929 before the crash, when of course they were far higher. Sixty per cent of the investment was in stocks and the rest in bonds.

"Now it is a fair assumption that, the securities which Mr. Rockefeller turned over to the Rockefeller Foundation represent a cross section of his holdings. What happened to the Rockefeller Foun-

dation holdings must have happened, on a larger scale, to the remaining holdings of the Rockefeller fortune.

"It has not been possible to figure the gains and losses on all the securities!, because not all of them are quoted on the market. We have the records, however, of 26 of the 48 stocks he gave the Rpckefeller Foundation; These 26 stocks in* the foundation's portfolio had a ledger value of 100,645,819d01. At the height of the boom they had risen to more than 256,000,000d01.

"As the market went down, however, these 26 stocks descended in total value to 56,468,027d01. The rise in the market this summer has brought them to a total value now of something over 87;000,000."

How Fortune Grew at First. • Turning to the application of these figures to the Rockefeller personal fortune, Mr. Flynn commented on the fact that after Mr.' Rockefeller's retirement in 1896 with a fortune of 200,000,000d0l at the most, he made money from his investments faster than he could give it

away in the greatest programme of philanthropy the world had ever seen. He and his son gave away a total of 574.1.'55,729d01 by 1928. There remained of this fortune in 1929, Mr. Flynn estimated, a sum between 500,000,000d0l and 1,000,000,000d01, perhaps nearer the first figure. "Using the Rockefeller Foundation portfolio as a cross eectioni" said Mr. Flynn, "it is a fair inference that the Rockefeller fortune has been cut 'to, at most, one-third of its size, even taking into consideration the current rise in security prices. And when the market was at its lowest, the Rockefeller fortune must have shrunk' to a fifth its former size."

How much of the fortune now belongs to the elder Rockefeller and how much to his son was not known to outsiders, Mr. Flynn said, but he said the last publication of income tax figures, in which the yflfanger Rockefeller paid a far greater tax than his indicated that the elder had transferred a large part of his holdings to his son.