Downtown

The only way to tell how much money Henry Ford makes or loses is to find the difference between each year's profit & loss surplus on the balance sheet which Ford Motor Co. is required to file annually in certain states where it does business. On that basis of rough calculation, financial writers were able to deduce last week from a statement of condition for 1933 filed with the Massachusetts Commissioner of Corporations, that Ford Motor Co. had finished the year with a $3,923,000 deficit against a deficit of $79,247,000 in 1932. Last year's production of Fords is estimated at 525,000 units, against 425,000 for 1932. The last profit shown by the company was in 1930. when earnings were $44,460,000, production 1,500,000 units.

Henry Ford was one of the few motor-makers who kept their prices unchanged when other leading companies were raising theirs last April. Now motormakers were reported to be bitterly regretting their action, and wanting to reduce prices again without losing face. Chevrolet pointed the way by announcing a new model with a few changes and a lower price. Terra-plane followed. Last week the new Chevrolet model was on display at the 61 General Motors' shows throughout the land. General Motors also slashed other Chevrolet prices as much as $50, Pontiac prices $40.

P:Andrew Jackson was fighting the Bank of the United States and New York commerce was paralyzed by an epidemic of cholera when the Bowery Savings Bank opened for business one hundred years ago last week. The Bowery was notorious for two things: vice and thrift. Fifty men and women, butchers, grocers, seamstresses, shoemakers, came in the first night to deposit savings of $2,020 which later were kept in the bank's two tiny leather-covered chests. A mutual savings institution for the poor and downtrodden, Bowery Savings was heavy with the smell of Sunday School and the mission society.

When Bowery Savings celebrated its centenary last week it had for several years been the biggest savings bank in the world. Deposits on Jan. 1 were $507,099,644 depositors 407,863. Two million people had banked there in 100 years, had been paid dividends of $280,000,000. The bank still maintains a branch on the Bowery, though its head office is in a Byzantine basilica on 42nd St. President Henry Bruere, who did not become a banker until he was 45, is a sociologist, has been active in housing experiments on Manhattan's lower East Side.

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