The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1917-12-31
LIBERTY BOND . LESSONS
 By HOWARD STEER Of Hincks Bros. & Co.
 Lesson No. 21. Seei SaWi Mar0erV DaW!
Lesson No. 21.
See! Saw! Margery DaW!

l it was young man. The day before 1t was an older man. And all last | week and each week for a month or more it has been fairly steady pro- cession of people who come in, timid or confident, and go out again, per haps satisfied, perhaps puzzled, but doubtless feeling bit uncertain abut 1 things in general.
 I Who are they? What do they want? And what puzzles them?
 | They are owners of Liberty Bonds. | They want to sell their bonds. They
 are puzzled to learn that they can't | get as much for their bonds as they paid for them. They thought they i could get the full amount of cash for | a Liberty Bond at any time because l they understood it to be a promise of the United States and just like money And yet at the time this ar
 ticle is being written $100 Liberty Sh per cent. bond can be sold for l only $9&40, and a 4 per cent. bond for only s97. Naturally they are 1 frightened and puzzled and even in- dignant. What is the matter?
 l In the first place they are. mis- taken in thinking of Liberty Bonds
 as just 50 much money. Last June and October a great many compari- sons were made in speeches and ad- vertisements between Liberty Bonds and money. The writer of these ar | ticles made. such comparisons, but
 always to illustrate how safe an in-
 vestment Liberty Bonds were. Both | bond and dollar bill are promises of ] the same government, and therefore 1 one is as, the safe as the other. Each
 is sure to be paid But the bill is l payable on demand, while the bond
 need not be paid until 1922 or 1947. The bill, being mere money, payable 1 on demand, gets no interest The bond receives B F per cent. or per l cent interest regularly until it is re- deemed, but if the holder wants to ] cash his bond before it is due, he must look to some private buyer and not to the government. There are l plenty of such buyers, but because l they are human beings and because
 new set of conditions exist also at
 every day, they will offer different l prices at different times.
 .I10I6l l6 b116 WuOl0 III d AuI-
 shell Suppose John D. Rockefeller owed you $20o- Suppose he should l ask you to take $1O0 in cash andi his
 note for the other $1o0, payable one
 year from today, with interest at 4 I per cent You agree. But in spite of the fact that that note is perfectly
 safe and sure to be paid, do you I think it would be as easy for you to
 change it into cash as it would be i to change your $100' bill into 20 five
 dollar bills? You could take the note to bank and they would pay you ssomething less than $100 in order to compensate themselves for tying up
 their money for a whole year. There l might be times when the bank would
 pay you the full s100, or even more,
 for the note. depending upon what interest rates they were able to lend
 their money at
 I In other words, any investment | which comes due at some later date will go up and down in price accord
 ing to the rate of interest it bears, how long time it has to run, and
 how much of demand there is for l that kind of investment
 l And in a sense, everything in the l world ir a sort of investment I jewelry, real estate. machinery, cloth Ing, skates, as well as stocks and
 bonds and mortgages. Take furni- l ture, for instance Compare the price you paid five years ago for that I diningroom table with the price you Ewould have to pay today and you will realize that you made a good in- vestment. Or take your grandmeth- CTS wedding furniture. The family
 was ready to chop it up for kiadling 1 about 20 years ago, and now collect ors are going around the country paying high prices for that Jvery
 model. A tandem bicycle or an old l high-wheeler used to cost two I or three hundred dollars. You
 couldn't give one away today. Skates
 you can sell second hand pair in
 winter for more than you will have
 to pay for new ones in summer time.
 Or how about old false teeth? Throw
 them in the ash barrel, of course. Il And yet a company was trying to buy
 them last summer. The platinum
 that fastened them together had be-
 come so valuable since the war that it was worth retaining
 And so it goes. See, Saw, Margery Daw, Teeter, Totter, Bread and Water. Up and Down, Down and
 Up. Prices, Values, backward, for
 ward. changing, changing, all the
 time. There is nothing in the wide Eworld that you can buy with abso- lutely certain knowledge that you can get back the exact price you paid for if at anu time xyo,,
 I "Oh, yes there is,'' you say. How
 about money?" I can always get five
 dollars for f1ve-dollar bill Wouldn't , have been better off if I had kept
 my money in bank instead of put
 ting it in Liberty Bonds that are sell
 ing now for, less than I paid for
 them ?''
 Yed have touched upon a big sub
 ject that is directly connected with all of this misunderstanding abeet Lib-
 erty Bond prices. We shall discuss il next time and try to show you that even money is no exception in this Ifftla ma of