Finance History|11 Wall Street — P and G Had to Hand the Bleach Back

People treat Clorox as an Oakland household-goods house that always printed CLX on its own.

The New York line is what remained after an antitrust court took the company out of Procter and Gamble.

Five Oakland investors founded the Electro-Alkaline Company on 3 May 1913. The company's own timeline records a 1914 stock issue of 750 shares that raised 75,000 dollars in then currency.

In 1928 the firm reorganized in Delaware as Clorox Chemical Company and issued 200,000 common shares on the San Francisco Stock Exchange.

Procter and Gamble acquired those assets on 1 August 1957 and renamed the subsidiary The Clorox Company.

The Federal Trade Commission challenged the purchase within months as a threat to competition in household liquid bleach.

On 11 April 1967 the Supreme Court, in FTC v. Procter and Gamble Co., 386 U.S. 568, upheld the Commission 7-0 and ordered divestiture. The New York Times the next morning recorded Clorox's 1957 share of national bleach sales at 48.8 percent.

Company history pages say Clorox common, previously traded over the counter, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1968.

The same pages date full independence to 2 January 1969, when the shares stood as a separate public corporation on that Exchange.

The mechanism is a court-ordered product-extension unwind. A soap parent had bought the leading bleach brand. The Court treated the combination as a barrier to entry, not as a finished monopoly already in place.

Holders who wanted laundry soap still owned PG. Holders who wanted the bleach book now owned CLX.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where the independent line printed. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.