State of Trade

Copper went last week to /7-c-a pound, up from a January low of 5-c-. Even hogs (which started last summer's boom and then dropped it) decided to move together in the right direction. More important than wheat, corn or cattle, hogs provide 12-c-of each farm dollar.

As the Farm Board sold its last 8,000,000 lb., cotton contracts touched 9-c-a pound. Venerable Boston wool merchants compared their market to the Wartime boom as the old clip neared exhaustion and wool tops hit 78-c- a pound against the year's low of 54-c-. In New Orleans brewers jacked the price of beer $1 a barrel because of rising malt and hop prices.

Shrewd U. S. businessmen feared only that industrial production may exhaust consumer demand before buying power slowly revives. But pleasing facts were: a 2.7% March-to-April rise in factory employment, a 4.4% rise in payrolls in the State of New York, both contrary to the usual season trend: an announcement by Rhode Island's labor commissioner that industrial employment rose 5.6% in April, that at the close of the month it stood nearly 10% above a year ago. Only Rhode Island industry reporting no gain was jewelry. Another consumer index was the Federal Reserve's figure on April department store sales, showing a 9% drop from twelve months ago against a 22% average drop for the first four months of this year.

The New York Times index of general business activity advanced for the seventh consecutive week to the highest point in 17 months.

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