Big Shots in the Dark

A BASIS FOR STABILITY--Samuel Crowtrier--Little, Brown ($3). With 21 interviewed bigwigs of 18 major industries collaborating, Author Crowther analyzes the current Great Depression. Author Crowther himself writes about credit and its artificially restricted issue. His industrial collaborators, with few exceptions, talk as if restricted credit had little to do with the Depression, but that overproduction (the other fellow's) caused it all. Walter C. Teagle considers that if the anti-trust laws were modified, oil (the other fellow's) would not be such a nuisance. Howard Heinz points a lesson: "The fact that food is essential to life makes the food industry a key industry of vital importance"; concludes, "commercially prepared food will always be the best food that anyone can buy." The President of the American Agricultural Chemical Co. suggests that Congress should legislate 50% of our farm lands out of crop production; the remainder (with plenty of A. A. C. Co.'s fertilizer) will produce all the crops we need. Industrialist Alfred P. Sloan Jr. is one of those to whom the credit problem is impressive. Says he: "The industrial machine did not break. It was the financial machine that broke because it was not geared to the country." Carl Snyder of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York proposes an annual 4% increase in the issue of credit to keep pace with estimated industrial growth. Author Crowther shares the Sloan and Snyder view and sounds it off pointblank: ''Unemployment and poverty are hardly to be considered as the natural sequences to plenty, yet that is the conclusion we are bound to reach if we adopt the theory of overproduction as a cause for business disaster. These disasters are not . . . business disasters. They are financial. The one thing lacking is money--credit." The book as a whole emits the familiar sound of big shots in the dark proclaiming dawn.

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