TABLE OF CONTENTS Merrill Cohen: A Memorial-Daniel Cohen Introductory Remarks: The Place of Ethics in the Ethics and Dealers in Securities: Analogies from the Investment Banking and Securities, an Industry of Ethical Problems in Self Regulation-Robert W. Haack Page V 1 3 10 18 MERRILL COHEN: A MEMORIAL Daniel Cohen My father probably would have noted, were he here, that it is purely an accident of fate that this symposium is on ethics and the securities markets. He always felt that it was utterly by chance that he ended up in the securities business. He began working when he was fourteen. Having finished his first year of high school, and being very poor, he decided he was ready to make his way in the world. He had had one job already as a messenger boy for the A. G. Johnson Electro-Type Company, but since he was the only messenger boy in Minneapolis, perhaps in the world, who couldn't ride a bicycle, he came to recognize that perhaps his future lay in other fields. Days and days of pounding the pavement had produced no job. But my father was very persistent and, after fruitless inquiries at one place of business after another, he learned at the Radisson Hotel. He got over there as fast as his bicycle-less legs could carry him and arrived simultaneously with another young man, a husky good-natured Irishman. They both applied for the job. My father was turned down, the other fellow got it, and that other fellow ended up owning the hotel. So it is by a mere quirk of fate that we are to discuss "ethics and the securities markets," and not "ethics and the hotel business," because my dad always said that if he had got the job he would have ended up owning the hotel. The job he did get, finally, was as an office boy at the old Minnesota Loan and Trust Company. It was a position where he acquired a taste for finance and for fine cigars, both of which were inclinations that lasted him a lifetime. It was a lifetime well spent, for there was very little that was good in life that escaped my father's attention. A good joke, a good cigar, a good balance sheet, he was a capable judge of all these things. He knew quality in things, and he knew quality in people. Not just securities people, or hotel people, but people; the standards they set for themselves, the standards they set for others, and, most importantly, the ones they actually followed. Even as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the National Association of Securities Dealers, and head of a District Committee on Business Ethics and Practices, my father had a problem in this area, because the standards he set for himself were impossibly high, and the standards he followed himself were impossibly high. He never took a commission on a sale. Even though many people would phone in and ask, he wouldn't do it. He always felt that it was his responsibility to turn the orders over to members of the sales force to build their confidence, to build their income, and to create a uniformly strong team among his wrong, whether he benefited in the long run or whether he lost. We used to argue about it a little, for it was something I could never understand. But the funny thing was that when we would argue about something like that, it would be his standards, and not mine, that we would discuss. But the real problem my father had in business ethics was in judging the standards of other people; not what should be done-he KNEW what should be done-but how to be tolerant of the standards of others. I don't think he ever did learn that kind of tolerance, and in a way I'm glad he didn't. For the headway he made, and the doors he opened for us through his life and through the standards he followed, were those of a man who led by his own example, not by passing judgment on the errors of others, not by the sanctions he imposed on others. He was a man who showed us the way by the way he did things himself. I'm 28 years old, and it is a little pretentious for me to say this, but I will say it anyway: "Go thou and do likewise." |