After the Truce

According to Marxian dialectic, capitalists foment wars to boost their profits. According to an old Wall Street saw: 'Peace is bullish." Last week the hardbitten traders on the New York Stock Exchange proved the old saying right and Marx wrong. In the first few days after the Korean truce, the Dow-Jones industrial average advanced six points to 275, the highest level in two months, and ended July with the first monthly gain since last December. At the beginning of this week, the average continued the rise.

Ever since the first truce meeting two years ago, there have been repeated "peace scares"--loose talk based on the uninformed belief that the war's end would send the economy into a tailspin. But businessmen were singularly unruffled when peace came. Around the country, they saw little change in the economic outlook. In Seattle, where the Boeing Airplane Co. payroll affects one person in six, Boeing President William Allen said the company's employment there would remain at 30,000. In Dallas, Economist Fred Carlson of Dresser Industries predicted: "Whatever reduction there may be in defense expenditures will not be enough to make the economy sag." Said Gordon M. Jones, president of the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce: "Let the budget be balanced, let the dollar be stabilized, and business will take in stride the curtailment of defense spending."

All signs indicated that the boom was still steaming along. Construction hit an alltime peak of $3.3 billion in July. Electric output, reflecting the high rate of industrial activity, set a new weekly high of 8,460,427,000 kilowatt-hours. Auto output for the first seven months of the year was at a record 3,852,624 units. Deposits in mutual-savings banks hit a new high of $23.6 billion. Even farm income, for months the most glaring weak spot in the economy, was off only 5% from last year to $12.6 billion in the first six months. And rosy corporate earnings continued to pour out. Second-quarter net profit of General Motors was $162 million v. $142 million a year ago. U.S. Steel's second-quarter net was $55,640,806, up from $22,218,922 a year earlier. Summing up the effects of the truce on the U.S. economy, Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. Chairman Ben Moreell declared: "A war economy is a destructive thing . . . The farther we go down the road to peace the better off we will be."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.