Charles Arthur Conant (July 2, 1861 – July 5, 1915) was an American journalist, author, and promoter who became recognized as an expert on banking and finance. Conant was descended from one of the earliest New England settlers ( Roger Conant) and was born in Winchester, Massachusetts. He studied in public schools and with private tutors, and between 1889 and 1901 was the correspondent in

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, for the

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''Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin''. In 1901–1902 he was in the Philippines to investigate coinage and banking, on a commission organized by the U.S. Secretary of War. He returned to take a positions as treasurer of the Morton Trust Company of New York where he specialized in overseas banking. In 1915

Elihu Root Elihu Root (; February 15, 1845February 7, 1937) was an American lawyer, Republican politician, and statesman who served as Secretary of State and Secretary of War in the early twentieth century. He also served as United States Senator from N ...

sent him to

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, but he died of a fever there.

Work

In retrospect, Conant's most important work consists of journal articles collected in The United States and the Orient, in which he argued, before

John A. Hobson John Atkinson Hobson (6 July 1858 – 1 April 1940) was an English economist and social scientist. Hobson is best known for his writing on imperialism, which influenced Vladimir Lenin, and his theory of underconsumption. His principal and e ...

and

Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 19 ...

, that

imperialism Imperialism is the state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas, often through employing hard power (economic and ...

was a natural, necessary, and ultimately positive outgrowth of capitalism. Conant was also amongst the first economists to articulate the economic utility of speculation on organized stock exchanges. In essays that were collected in the book "Wall Street and the Country, "He argued, in what is a familiar formulation today, that stock prices reflect all of the information available about a corporation, economic conditions, etc., and that those prices were thus a measure of a stock's "true value." The trends of the market, he concluded, were an indication of where the nation's capital could most profitably be invested. His main caveat was that pure gambling by uninformed speculators could hurt the market's ability to reflect true values. He urged that speculation only be carried on by experienced investors with the ability to understand and process complex financial and economic information. He wrote many articles for periodicals and encyclopedias on American and on Latin-American finance and trade, and published: * ''A History of Modern Banks of Issue'' (1896; fourth edition, 1909) * ''The United States in the Orient: The Nature of an Economic Problem'' (1900) * ''Alexander Hamilton'' (1901) * ''Wall Street and the Country'' (1904) * ''The Principles of Money and Banking'' (1905)

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* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Conant, Charles Arthur 1861 births 1915 deaths American economics writers American finance and investment writers People from Winchester, Massachusetts American essayists American male essayists Economists from Massachusetts