Current Situation

The New Year prophets have come and gone. And the average business man is now trying to summarize their messages, and find out what they said. First, he finds that financial as well as other doctors disagree; second, that when such messages from the master minds of Business really say anything, it is apt to be limited to the district or business in which the particular master mind is preeminent.

The financial editor of The New York Times* in all this various Babel of tongues, shows his usual good sense. He listed the leading favorable and unfavorable tendencies now discernible in American Business, and left the conclusion for the reader to form for himself. Here are his lists:

The "grounds for hopefulness," as he calls them, are: 1) our impregnable gold, credit and banking position;

2) large recent profits in industry;

3) recent record freight traffic and signs of its likely continuance; 4) a conservative and economical administration in Washington; 5) economic recovery in Europe, clearly beginning despite Germany and Russia.

The case for the pessimist, he itemized as follows: 1) potentiality of credit inflation due to our abnormal gold reserve; 2) uncertainty as to the continuance of large industrial profits, as seen in declining commodity prices, the steel industry, etc.; 3) probability of attack, and its possibility of success, by radical Congressmen upon the Transportation Act; 4) unsettling influence of Presidential election, bonus agitation, possible tampering with Federal Reserve Act by farm bloc; 5) Germany drifting into bankruptcy, England faced with a Labor Ministry, France feeling the results of debt inflation, reparations still unsettled.

In conclusion, Mr. Noyes discreetly remarked: "Different men will strike a different balance between the good influences and the bad as making weight in determining the history of 1924."

*Mr. Alexander Dana Noyes.