THE COTTON CORNER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2581, 2 September 1903, Page 9 (Supplement)

THE COTTON CORNER.

According to a cable message of recent date, Mr Brown, of New Orleans, and those acting with him, have cleared seven million dollars, say a million and a quarter sterling, out of the recent cotton corner. This is the result of some

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respectable sum of more than three millions sterling. Undeterred by this experience, he last year set to work to boom cotton, and succeeded to some extent. Then he and his brokers quarrelled, and the latter managed to deflate the boom so effectively that 'Mr Price dropped something like half a million. He then appears to drop out of the story, and Mr Scully takes his place. Mr Scully was a young cotton buyer for

observed large quantities of cotton seed lying out in the fields, frozen in the floods, and he knew that the planters would sow t.his frozen damaged seed, quite regardless of the effect on the crop. Putting all these things together, and learning also of the advance of a new sort of "bug" which was devastating the cotton crops, Mr Scully predicted a rise in prices and a cotton famine by the present year. A few months

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ago he began to push prices up until from six or seven cents per pound it stood «it eleven cents. Then Mr Scully decided it was time to sell. But at that period Mr Brown, of New Orleans, wrifch some friendt, decided to take a hand in the game. They asserted that cotton, instead of having, leached its limit, would reach fourteen cents, and forthwith Brown, of New Orleans, became the man of the hour. The " bears" — Mr Brown was a "bull" — made a tremendous attack on him, and at one time it looked as if he would succumb, for Ihe market broke badly once, but the Napoleonic Brown seems to have managed to hold rather more than his own, and to have had the 'best of the deal after all. Scully, the dethroned Napoleon of the cotton market, has half a million sterling in the way of profits to console him. The cotton operatives in the olosed-down mills in England and America have suffered considerably, but thait, of course, is a mere detail.