"Reckless"

On the floor of the Chicago Board of Irade one day last week, a trader idly remarked that he presumed the Government was temporarily out of the market as a buyer of cash wheat. In a few minutes, this bit of gossip was exaggerated into a "report" that the Government would stop buying for 60 days. Although the Government denied the rumor a few a hours later, December wheat dropped 8-c- a bushel from its peak of the day.

This was ludicrous proof of a new jumpiness in the nation's grain exchanges and their acute sensitivity to everything Washington did -- or said. Nor was the jumping in only one direction. After Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson disclosed that Japan needed an "unexpectedly large" amount of grain, December wheat soared to $3.20 1/4 a bushel, the highest in 30 years. Cash oats reached their highest price ($1.37 a bushel) in the 100 years of Board of Trade history.

Many a trader thought that Washington still did not realize how its loose schedules and loose talk upset the markets. Nor did they think the Administration really understood what thin ice it was skating on. Grain dealers testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee that the foreign relief program may leave the U.S. with a dangerously low grain carryover.

George A. Kublin of the Kansas City Board of Trade estimated that the carry-over on next July 1 would be only 130,000,000 bushels. (The Department of Agriculture put it at 146,000,000.) "Anything smaller than a 235,000,000-bushel carry-over," Kublin warned, "is reckless."

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