Current Situation

The status quo of business can often be determined by the prophecies of various business groups. Some manufacturers are stoutly insisting in public that the stock market no longer accurately discounts the future, while privately they are trimming their sales for 1924. Most merchants, whose sales have not yet started to decline, apparently foresee limitless prosperity ahead. A prophet of a different sort is Leonard P. Ayres of the Cleveland Trust Co., whose predictions as to the trend of business have in recent years proved so accurate and courageous that his remarks are always worth listening to. His mouthpiece, the fortnightly bulletin of the Cleveland Trust, now expresses its opinion that 1924 will be a year of diminished prosperity, and cites the obvious decline in output of iron and steel, automobiles, tires, cotton, wool, shoes and building construction. It also declares that short-term interest charges are about to begin a long decline, and that in consequence food prices should respond by commencing a gradual rise. The bulletin very sanely concludes: "There is good reason to believe at the present time we are not headed for any drastic period of depression, but nearly all the familiar indications point to a less active year in 1924 than that now drawing to a close. It seems probable that general business will decline to levels lower than the present ones before it will again recover to any such pitch of activity as it reached last Spring."