"THE CENTRAL MARKET SYSTEM AND COMMISSION RATES"
THE OPENING PAGES OF THIS SPEECH AND OTHERS, GIVING A PERSONAL IMPRESSION OF RAY GARRETT, JR., HAVE BEEN GRACIOUSLY PROVIDED BY HARVEY L. PITT.

An Address by
Ray Garrett, Jr., Chairman
Securities and Exchange Commission

Presented before
THE CENTRAL MARKET SYSTEM AND COMMISSION RATES
Pacific Northwest District Securities Industry Association
September 6, 1974
Coeur D'Alene, Idaho

You put a great strain on a visitor from back East. Wednesday afternoon I spent a profitable and pleasant hour with Jack Bookey and his staff in our Seattle Regional Office. This was my first visit to that Office as Chairman, and, prior to it, Jack had been complaining of neglect. It's a pose well cultivated by Seattle Regional Administrators -- a job so burdensome that we have had only three in the 40-year history of the Commission, most of which were filled by the incomparable Jim Newton. The pose, I say, is to affect an air of abuse and inattention while quietly enjoying the peculiar pleasures of being let pretty much alone in a delightful spot. But I want you to know that it's Jack's own fault that I've been deprived of the pleasure of an earlier visit to Seattle -- after all, his tight and effective reign over the regional office has made it exceedingly difficult for me to find an adequate excuse to make the trip out here.

Yesterday, I had a fascinating tour of the Spokane fair. The capital of this Inland Empire has certainly entered an era of new glory. But that excursion, plus another day here in Coeur D'Alene, make it difficult to recall what I came here to worry about, or rather to worry you about.

I would prefer to worry someone into teaching me fly-casting. I have never learned, and some tentative efforts to learn have been near-disastrous. In one of his essays on trout fishing, Herbert Hoover wrote of the fisherman's pecking order. The dry-fly fisherman, he said, looks down on the wet-fly, who scorns the lad with the bamboo pole. Still, he said, all of us, if we are wise, will have a can of worms in a back pocket against the day of desperation, but I'd like to get a bit further up the pecking order for starters. I don't like to begin desperate.

When you invited me here, however, I assume you had in mind that I might reflect on a different form of desperation -- that desperation we all share when viewing the current state of the securities market and, especially, what the federal government is doing to them.

These are no pleasant times. Things are sufficiently depressed, and on such a wide scale, that I hardly know where to begin....

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