Business: Needed: A Balanced Budget

Before the 48th annual convention of the Investment Bankers Association of America last week in Bal Harbour, Fla., outgoing President William D. Kerr posed a challenge: “I visualize a titanic struggle between the forces that would foster and perpetuate our local governments and our right to the well-known freedoms and those who would turn these United States into a huge federal omnibus in which the individual would be reduced to being a number in a file.”

Kerr, a partner in the Chicago investment house of Bacon, Whipple & Co., told the bankers that those “who know the invariable wisdom of balanced budgets, of stable money and of sound debt management must be moved to use every means to convince the people of this country that their standard of living and the freedom of their daily lives are at stake.”