PARITY IF HERE

Parity Is Here

U.S. farm prices last week reached Utopia, the legendary level called "parity." The Department of Agriculture said that prices received by farmers were 131% of the 1909-14 level, up 36% in the past year; that prices paid by farmers (for equipment, clothes, etc.) also were 131% of the base years, 7% over a year ago. Thus the relationship between farm income and farm outgo is the same as in the fat pre-war years. Except for a brief spell in 1937, this magic balance had not been achieved since 1928.

But Utopia is always somewhere else. The farmers want more. In Washington, Alabama's Senator John Hollis Bankhead advised farmers to keep their cottonseed off the market until prices hit $60 a ton (last week's price: about $47, an 18-year high). Wheat farmers have withheld so much (about 40%) of this year's bumper 950,000,000 bushel crop that the conservative Bureau of Agricultural Economics last week turned tipster, predicted wheat would jump another icxf; a bushel within a few months. It now figures 1941 U.S. cash farm income at $10,500,000,000, 15% above last year and the highest since 1929.

Encouraged by the farmers' rapacity, speculators continued to boom commodity prices. At week's end, cotton prices were up 80% over the year's low, at eleven-year highs, soybeans (see p. 38) were up 75%, wheat 60%, both at four-year peaks.

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