INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 227, 7 September 1933, Page 5

INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL

PLAN IN UNITED STATES. DEFINITE RESULTS CLAIMED. The plan to increase purchasing power and restore business now being tried out in the United States is showing definite results, according to a number of business leaders and authorities whose opinions are summarised in the issue of the Literary Digest of August 5. Most of these authorities deal with the second quarter of the year and they find that the industrial revival has been so pronounced that the normal midsummer slump has been “smothered.” The Digest says that not even the violent crash on the securities and commodities markets just then experienced could raise a doubt that the revival in business and industry was genuine. The statistical authority of the Cleveland Trust Company stated that activity in business was increasing more than twice as swiftly as it had done in any previous period of recovery from depression conditions and at a pace about five times as rapid as that attained in 1915, when the huge war orders Were pouring in from Europe. The National City Bank of New York characterised it as the most impressive showing of business recovery ever made in a comparable period in the country. Another authority noted that in the short period of three and a-half months the general business index gained 56 per cent.; wholesale commodity prices, 62 per cent.; railroad car loadings, 38 per cent.; while the basic steel industry showed a gain of 250 per cent. Five definitely favourable trends con. tributed to the improvement during the second (Quarter of 1933, in the opinion of Dun and Bradstreet. These were the continued decline in commercial failures, the sustained rise in commodity prices, the greater volume of industrial sales, the impressive gain in industrial activity, and the substantial increase in employment. Industry was placed at the beginning of the third quarter of 1933 in the strongest position it had occupied in many years.

In spite of this general optimism there were some words of caution. Fourteen millions or more adults were still without work and it was hard to see how more than four or five million of them could be reabsorbed into industry or put to work on public projects within a year. This would still leave ten million unemployed—a figure which would have been regarded as staggering in the peak years. Wage payments were down 50 per cent, as compared with 1929, when they were regarded as too low. Farm income was down about 60 per cent, as compared with 1929, when the farmers- were in desperate straits.