"Bad Sign"

British armament shares were booming at such a rate last week that Labor's irate, pacifist London Daily Herald was able to cite 13 leading issues which have risen an average of 207% since His Majesty's Government started the boom with their $1,500,000,000 program of new armaments (TIME, Nov. 11). Urged to dampen this speculative rise by promising that His Majesty's Government will by law curtail armorers' profits, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said: "Great as the power of government is, I am afraid we can't control the speculator, and it would do no good to give him advice."

This, if anything, increased the boom, and London Stock Exchange gigolos--the well-born young Englishmen with wealthy women friends who get 50% commission on orders they put in the way of regular brokers--were chided by the financial editor of Lord Beaverbrook's patriotic Daily Express. Wrote he: "I hear that the 'half commission boys' in the West End are speculating in aircraft shares on behalf of their clients, the ladies. This is always a bad sign."

Favored by the ladies and their boys as leading aircraft-armaments stocks are Rolls-Royce, Fairey and Hawker-Siddeley. Last week Rolls-Royce was so preoccupied with producing aircraft engines that swank motorists eager to plank down -L-1,850 ($9,250) for the new 12-cylinder Rolls-Royce "Phantom III" were told that they cannot expect delivery before February 1937.

Even more spectacular has been the jump in shares of British shipyards, recently down & out, now all set to build warboats. The disgusted Daily Herald, after first severely warning its Labor readers that they will probably lose their shirts if they jump into the market now, tantalizingly explained that a nest egg of $2,500 invested one year ago in three ship-building and two aircraft stocks would today have become a tidy little fortune of $25,500.

In excited political circles talk was veering around from the urgent rumors fortnight ago that "Bumbler Baldwin" could not much longer remain Prime Minister, to the opposite notion that the Arms Boom is creating an elated situation in which, no matter what he does or says, he will be as popular as Herbert Hoover was in 1928.

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