Angas (Cont'd)

Wall Street had fun last week at the expense of Major Lawrence Lee Bazley Angas and his latest pamphlet The Coming American Boom (TIME, Aug. 27). For a time the brisk, dapper London stockbroker, whose record as a market forecaster has been well publicized, displaced President Roosevelt as the most-discussed man in the Street. One day when stock-market trading dwindled to the lowest level in twelve years, brokers said it was because everyone had stopped to read Major Angas' prediction. Few days later when trading swelled suddenly to more than 1,000,000 shares and prices soared, they called it the "Angas rally." When the rally faltered next day one broker remarked: "What this market needs is another market letter writer from the Scottish Isles."

Serious critics dubbed the book a "glorified tip sheet." Chief objection was to the fact that Major Angas interpreted the whole New Deal in terms of the Roosevelt monetary policies. Young Banker James P. Warburg, while ripping the Major's theories and monetary dogma to shreds and pointing out how superficial (and sometimes inaccurate) was the Major's knowledge of New Deal history, nevertheless declared: "It is the sort of literature which, more than anything else, will contribute toward a repetition of the 1929 disaster and toward making the present effort at controlled inflation end in a wild inflationary orgy."

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