Electric Power and Light Corporation as an Illustration of the Public Utility Holding Company

After having witnessed the debacle of the stock market in recent years, there is small wonder that the public at a whole would not dare invest its savings without first making careful inquiry into the sort of machinery that could bring about each a disaster. Inasmuch as "A burned child dreads the fire" so does a nation of investors fear to entrust its savings to a mechanism that has so recently let everything slide. The head of any government should not have to urge his people to cease hoarding its money. To invest its savings should be the first impulse of a thrifty people. The next move should be to invest those savings wisely and judiciously, not with the hope of increasing the capital severalfold over-night, but with the confident knowledge that a reasonable return on the investment would be certain.Aside from the point of view of the investing public in those companies is the interest the consumers have in the amount charged for the utilities. Every community in the United States is affected, to some degree, by the prices charged for the services rendered. Wary individual should be brought to the realization that the holding company is a very essential medium for large-scale production and for large-scale distribution. He should be made to see that such a necessary public servant must be cultivated and not destroyed, that it must be made subject to the forms of social control that will enable it to serve the public rather than to serve merely the relatively few "Captains of industry" who create and control it.With the above problems in mind, I have sought to assemble data that would give an insight into the machinery of a typical holding company, along with its present setting and its early history. If the holding company be used under proper governmental supervision, its securities should become attractive to investors. Moreover, with proper social control of the holding company, a menace to investments in operating utility companies will disappear.