IN TOO FEW HANDS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 37, 13 February 1930, Page 20

IN TOO FEW HANDS

AMERICA'S SAVINGS "We havo heard a good deal in New Zealand in regard to th 6 enormous savings constantly boasted about as proving- the unprecedented prosperity of tho United States," observed Mr. Will Appleton in the course of a conversation with a "Post" reporter yesterday. "But I inado some inquiries on this -point and found that in Detroit, for instance, one automobile 'king' has a deposit of something like 22,000,000 dollars in the savings department of one of the big banks. Something like 200,000 wage earners in the same city have about 3,000,000 dollars between them, in amounts ranging from one dollar upwards. So it will be seen that this one automobile inagnato had more than seven times the amount of money in this one bank that the 200----000 workers had; and I would not be a bit surprised to know that the motor man had many other millions'deposited in other banks. Nowhere else in the world are the financial resources 'hunched' as they are in America. The prosperity boom that we have heard so much about has only served to pile up the fortunes of the 14,000 American millionaires and to maKe millions of poor people. I am sorry to say that while I was in some of the big cities in America I noticed a great deal of poverty; more so, in fact, than I observed in England. Men and women who never before had to ask for free lodgings from the charitable societies are now doing so. lam afraid that the words 'optimist' and 'optimism' have been overworked, and a great deal of distress will have to be gone through in America before conditions come back to normal." ?