U.S. Stock Exchange Experts Open Seminar in Moscow

New York Stock Exchange officials and leading U.S. financial experts opened a seminar today to teach an eager Soviet audience about equity markets, share trading and other building blocks of a capitalist economic system.

The three-day seminar in the former bastion of world communism drew 400 Soviet officials and fledgling entrepreneurs intent on learning how a stock exchange might ease their country’s difficult transition to a market economy.

“Private savings hidden under mattresses or buried in the ground might give their owners comfort, but they don’t get into the economy’s bloodstream,” said John Chalsty, president and chief executive officer of the equities firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

Chalsty’s remark was particularly apt in the Soviet Union, where extreme shortages of consumer goods have caused a “ruble overhang,” in which citizens have squirreled away an estimated $510 billion in Soviet rubles.

“Just remember: All these (financial) terms are simply formal evidence that millions of people like you and me are really owners of American businesses or lenders to the U.S. government,” said Chalsty, who is also vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.

During a break in the opening session, dozens of Soviet seminar participants clustered around a television set showing a videotape that used cartoon characters to explain how a stock exchange works.

John Joyce, charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, described the seminar as “a very important event--in fact a milestone in relations between our two countries.”

American speakers described the conference as an information exchange and appeared eager to avoid creating the impression of lecturing to their Soviet listeners.

“We come with no simple solutions to the complex issues that face you,” NYSE Chairman John Phelin told the gathering.