The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 1931. AMERICAN TRADING CONDITIONS

Hokitika Guardian, 26 January 1931, Page 4

The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 1931. AMERICAN TRADING CONDITIONS

The United States, with its gold hoarding and great reputation for big business, is regarded generally as a highly prosperous country. The story of its internal business as revealed by financial and commercial journals, does not bring out the picture of presentday conditions in too bright a colour. Here is a note struck in a banking publication to hand by the late mail:— “ Since business men nad been counting on some sort of a recovery this autumn it i 3 natural that this failure of their hopes to materialise should have had a depressing effect. As usual, this disappointment has found reflection in the stock market, where prices, which had been holding up on expectations of an early revovery in corporation earnings, have given way to new low levels more in keeping with the revised ideas as to the outlook for corporation profits. And as the market has declined, business sentiment, which is always influenced largely by the market, has had another sinking spell that has tended to put a dumper oil recovery.” Here are conditions not unlike those in New Zealand. Brighter prospects were hoped for here in the new year, but the horizon is still dimmed. though expectations always keep buoyant. In America, the authority we quote from, admits that industry and trade have a great deal to contend with. Values *of stock have fallen, causing a great loss of capital, and this adverse circumstance has produced unsatisfactory economic conditions generally, and the general unrest over the world is not helping matters, d'lie critic would consider the outlook in the United States disheartening were it not that such conditions are to a certain extent the usual accompaniment of economic depression. Let those who assert that the present world confusion is unprecedented only remember back to 1921, —Europe ex-

hausted bv war and in serious danger of revolution; currencies collapsing; South America and Australia, then as now, acutely affected by the heavy fall in raw material prices; docks and warehouses the world over filled to overflowing with undeliverable American merchandise; banks burdened with protested foreign exchange items; Cuba in moratorium; and in the Far East, Japan suffering from the aftereffects of a panic which proved to he the first warning of the coming storm. Yet such conditions, desperate as they appeared at the time, did not prevent recovery once started, from proceeding at a rate which confounded the pessimists. If it he true that the problems now pressing for solution, involving as they do such questions as international debts, tariffs, destinies of empire, and readjustment of industry and agriculture everywhere to a new scale of vulues, and more complex than those of 1921, —ttud here it would be well to make allowance for the buliititt tendency always td regard curi’ent difficulties as tlie most perplexing evdi 1 experienced,—we still see no reason for failing to face the future with confidence. Obviously tlio full measure, of prosperity ior all depends upon the satisfactory solution of these problems, bpt we do not believe that the world need stand still in the meantime. Trade throughout practically all countries has been so depressed that an increase would seem necsseary before long if only to take care of the barest needs of consumption. There is nothing very helpful in this statement of the case, hut we are always hopeful and perhaps bottom has been reached. If so a rise is due, and with it will come improving conditions. But they will not be easy conditions for a long time to come, and because of that plans must be laid accordingly, and economy must remain the watchword, and the necessary action for a considerable time to come.