Curtain

The Temporary National Economic (Monopoly) Committee, which fortnight ago was entertained by SEC Chairman William O. Douglas' smart display of the insurance industry's enormous power, last week heard Bill Douglas try to prove that insurance directors use their influence to swing business their own way. Evidence: 1) while a director of New York Life, Alfred E. Smith solicited fuel oil contracts for certain of its properties; 2) Mutual Life's deposit at Bankers Trust Co. jumped from $150,000 to $1,500,000 when Bankers Trust's President S. Sloan Colt became a director; 3) the Chicago law firm of Mitchell D. Follansbee, director of Metropolitan Life, has received $334,000 in fees from the Metropolitan since 1932.

Rebuttal to that testimony came from New York Life's Chairman Thomas A. Buckner, whose directors include RCA's chairman and R. H. Macy's president. "If we carried out your theory to its logical conclusion," observed Mr. Buckner, "we couldn't send a radiogram or buy a desk at Macy's."

At week's end the Monopoly Committee rang down the curtain on insurance, will raise it again in the spring.* Next act: an FTC lecture on its long dealings with general business, to be followed by the Federal Alcohol Administration on liquor.

Last week the U. S. Government also did the following to and for U. S. Business:

> Completed a year's study of the newsprint industry. In January 1938 the Attorney General asked the Federal Trade

Commission to investigate publishers' complaints of newsprint price-fixing. Last week FTC submitted its findings to the Department of Justice without recommendations and without revealing details. It is now up to Trust Buster Thurman Arnold to determine what action, if any, should be taken against the industry, a question complicated by the fact that much of the industry is located in Canada.

>Jumped on Bloomingdale Bros., Manhattan department store. FTC ordered it to stop referring to goods only partially made of wool as "wool."

> Jumped on William Cooper & Nephews, Inc. of Chicago. FTC accepted its promise not to advertise that its Pulvex Flea Powder "kills fleas 100% faster," without saying faster than what.

> Released the third of a series of 25 reports called the "census of American Listed Corporations." Prepared by WPA workers under SEC sponsorship, the reports are intended to bridge the gap between the tremendous volume of data in SEC's files and the potential users to whom it is now relatively inaccessible. The completed reports are sent to a selected list of 1,000 big brokers, bankers, statisticians, anyone else who writes in. First two were on meat packers and steel. Last week's dealt with chain variety stores. Sample fact: F. W. Woolworth Co.'s net worth per dollar of total debt in 1934 was $31.21, in 1937 $10.23.

>Cracked down on 18 leading U. S. tire companies. Charging price collusion in submitting identical bids for Government contracts, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold sued the 18 for $1,053,474.63. Like the Government's crackdown on cement and threatened crackdown on steel pricing policies, the action was symptomatic of the New Deal's current conviction that rigid industrial prices are the basis both of monopoly and of continued hard times.

*At the end of the hearings, Acting Chairman Hatton W. Sumners, who had borrowed a cough drop from Northwestern Mutual's President Michael J. Cleary, tossed Witness Cleary a new box of cough drops, commenting: "Nobody can say this committee can be bought."

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