HAS AMERICA BLUNDERED?

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 119, 12 January 1932, Page 4

HAS AMERICA BLUNDERED?

Intermittently for several years past the news cables from the United States have told of financial chaos in Chicago America's second largest city. As Chicago, however, had earned an unenviable reputation for several other kinds of chaos, especially since the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment and the rise to power and fortune of the bootlegger by means involving every imaginable kind of corruption and violence, this did not cause a great deal of surprise. Unhappily for America, its administrative systems, federal, state and municipal, seem to be peculiarly susceptible to the subversive activities of the dealer in bribery and other forms of graft, as the word is understood in the land where the dollar is king, if not god. .New Tork also, where Tammany Hall has long been supreme in municipal politics, has had its troubles, due to very much the same causes. The latest news from across the Pacific, published yesterday, gives the matter a new and much more significant complexion. Four of America's largest cities are stated to be facing bankruptcy. These, in addition to the two named, also include Detroit and Philadelphia, the two greatest industrial cities of America. Detroit's troubles are attributed in the very abbreviated message to extravagant expenditure on unemployment re~ lief, while in Philadelphia a revenue shrinkage is mentioned. While in Chicago and New York financial difhculties such as those indicated may be symptomatic of nothing of greater national moment than local corruption and a consequent refusal by financiers to invest in city securities, the same almost certainly cannot be said of the other two cities. Indeed, the cause mentioned in connection with Detroit's present difhculties is the one which those having some knowledge of conditions in that city during the past two years would most expect. It has not,. since the post-war boom ended, been the policy of America to publish dependable unemployrnent statistics. Figures have from time to time been furnished, but these are known to have been either inaccurate or out of date and it is therefore extremely doubt1'ul if the American masses themselves, much less foreign countries, have any accurate conception of the magnitude of the unemployment problem which appears now to be fast crippling the country. A little less than twelve months ago a New Zealander returning from an eighteen months' sojourn in a city not .far from Detroit reported that when he left America over 900,000 of Detroit's 4,000,000 population were unemployed according Ao autnoritative local computations. If this estimate was anywhere near the mark, some conception can be gained of the exIreme gravity of the industrial situation in the States. Since then unemployment in such purely industrial cities as Detroit and Philadelphia has probably increased and possibly now exceeds 25 per cent, not of the working population, but of the total population. In this country much has been made of the unemployment problem, but grave though it undoubtedly is, it pales into insignificance beside the American figures. If those quoted are even approximately accurate — and they are by implication supported by the news cable mentioned above — America's danger would appear to be as great as, if not greater than,, that of any country in Europe, and this in spite of her immense store of gold. ! Evidently, as leading economists have pointed out recently, the American financiers have blundered badly in their attempts to ■ wrest from England the financial leadership of the world, de- \ spite their gold, their tariffs and the fact that the rest of the ! world is their debtor. . j