The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-09-16
LOTS IF VITALITY IN STOCK MARKET Operations Extend To Nearly All Stocks On The List STEEL LEADS ADVANCE Taft's Utterances Help the Market and Expectation That Steel Will Be
 Listed in Paris Boosts
 That Stock.
STEEL LEADS ADVANCE

New York, September 15.-The specula- tion in stocks today gave greater evil dence of vitality and of naturalness than for long time past. Operations were not confined so entirely to a handful of stocks or even, as has been the case often, to three stocks-Union Pacific, Reading and United States Steel. Those three stocks were by no means obscure In the days transactions, but they did not ab- sorb 50 per cent of the aggregate deal ings as they have done on more than one occasion recently. The demand branched out into new quarters and shifted rapidly from one stock or group to another. News to account for those movement was not forthcoming always or even generally and conjecture was obliged to fall back on some general explanation which would apply either to business projects or to opportunity for speculation, or both. Of the former class was the interpretation placed by the financial community upon President Taft's speech in Boston at the outset of his long speech-making tour of the west.
 The chief executives indorsement of the plan for the establishment of central bank of issue as a means of solving the
 
 sentiment in the financial district. So had the cheerful belief expressed that we are on the eve of another great business expansion and era of prosperity" Even the insistence of the need of further re- form of business methods and the danger of lapse in old abuses was read In the light of the qualification. Nothing revo- lutionary, nothing disturbing to legiti- mate business Is needed" rather than in the light of the main contention. A good augury of the effects of the coming trip was drawn by the financial community from the texture of this preliminary ad- dress. Considerable speculative activity seems to have been prompted by this con- sideration.
 Industrious use was made also of the rumors of approachment between the two great banking groups usually designated as the Standard oil and Morgan groups. These concrete facts on which these rumors were based sifted' down to the election of J. P. Morgan, Jr, as director of the National City bank, a Standard oil institution, and of James Stillman, chair man of the board of that bank, as a di- rector of the Cleveland, Columbus, Cin- cinnati and St. Louis railway, one of the Morgan-Vanderbilt railroads. As George w. Perkins, one of the Morgan partners. fwas already a director of the National City bank, and as James Stillman was al- ready a director of the New York Gen. .tral the new order of things presented mo revolutionary aspect Tn specula- tive imagination took fire with the at Stractive suggestion however, and threw itself with ardor into the buying of stocks at rapidly rising prices
 Of material influence on the days mar ket was the report from Pittsburs of the visit to the steel works of a French vbanlxer who 1t was assumed was securing Information to pave the way of listing United States Steel on the Paris bourse The grounds for this assumption was the discreet refusal of the French banker to say anything on the subject The air of mystery rather added than detracted from the attraction of the report. It was the