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With nearly $100 billion in assets, U.S. insurance companies are the nation's greatest reservoir of private capital, the dispensers of investments that have an incalculable impact on the U.S. economy. Last year some $10 billion of life insurance funds was invested in the U.S. economy, $1.6 billion of it by Prudential. Almost anyone, big businessman or little, farmer or factory hand, can qualify for a Prudential loan or mortgage. At the top of the Pru's list of borrowers is a Who's Who of U.S. industry: International Business Machines (some $550 million since 1936), General Motors, Chrysler Corp., Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., International Harvester, Goodyear Tire & Rubber.
The giants are only a fraction of the Pru's business. At President Shanks's direction, the company pours an even bigger chunk of its treasure into mortgages and loans to individuals and small businessmen. All told, $6.1 billion of the Pru's assets, some 46%, is tied up in mortgages and real estate, proportionately more than any other life insurance company. The Pru is the world's biggest private holder of home mortgages (500,000), one of the biggest financers of huge skyscrapers (Manhattan's Empire State Building, Chicago's Merchandise Mart, Cincinnati's Terrace Hilton Hotel), a strong backer of the new shopping-center boom. It supplied $8,000,000 for Minneapolis' new Southdale Center and $100 million for Los Angeles' Lakewood shopping center and for more than 7,500 houses in a new development surrounding the center. In every U.S. activity there is Pru money, from cattle and cotton to guided-missile factories, race tracks and country clubs.
Nor does the Pru stop there. The apple of President Shanks's eye is a new Commercial and Industrial Loan Department, set up to make funds available to small businessmen who ordinarily cannot get long-term loans through normal bank channels. "What we're looking for," says one Prudential executive, "is the nice little company making a nice little product in Bucyrus, Ohio." The Pru has found plenty of them. Among the loans: $200,000 to help reforest a Florida tree farm, $750,000 to a Nashville religious-book company, $54,000 to Kansas City's Papec Machine Co., makers of agricultural appliances, another $120,000 to six El Dorado (Ark.) doctors who convinced the Pru that their town needed a medical center.
Free Lunches. To do a better job selling insurance—and spreading loans evenly throughout the economy—Shanks kicked off the biggest decentralization program in the history of U.S. insurance. Since 1946 the Pru has opened six regional offices spread across the U.S. and Canada. Shanks laid out more than $10 million for a towering Los Angeles home office, another $10 million for a 21-story Houston home office to back the Pru's faith in Texas' booming economy, still another $40 million for a 41-story Chicago home office that was the first new skyscraper to rise over the Lake Front in 20 years. Millions more went into Minneapolis, Jacksonville and Toronto for modern regional home offices with air conditioning, restaurants (free lunches for employees) and auditoriums; the Houston office even has a swimming pool. Everywhere the Pru plunked down its dollars for handsome new buildings, it brightened the faces of cities and spurred local economies.