The Walk-on
Copyright© 2018 by The Twelfth Man
Chapter 19
We invested the smaller $10 Billion amount into several more secure stocks(to us) and the casino business under our control. Our new speculative ventures, such as the arms business we were going into were to be funded by the $25 Billion fund we had designated earlier as our ‘war chest’; the feeling of all of us was any or all of that was speculative anyway so if we lost it, so what. Since it was a general fund, everyone including Bren and the Nashville gals got a piece to start with.
Tony and my Dad took an international as well as a domestic funding and took Jeff’s advice regarding divesting the malls and office buildings. This was later proven to be a smart move. In several of the ‘good’ climate areas where there were not fires, three malls and two large parking fields got huge screens for a modern version of the old ‘drive in’ theme. When people could no longer go out and socialize, watching from your own vehicle was a big hit. It seemed we were doing a few things right. Tony and Dad cut back on foreign investments as did we, it was almost impossible to ‘trust’ outsiders beyond places we could touch and feel whenever we wanted to.
We were starting to take some losses too. Following Tony and Dad’s examples we cut back more, cut back investing a lot really. It took nearly 4 and a half months for our participation in some ventures to stop. A few, OK, a lot of people were upset when we no longer played banker, but our war chest of $25 Billion was still where it began. Our increase was NADA but at least we had not lost principle just any profits.
One area however, later got over $3 Billion of investment, that was the food business. The money bought existing farms, raw land and retail food distribution in the US and parts of Canada; stores and warehouses mostly. Profits increased 15-22% within a year. It sure beat putting in the bank.