Simmerings

The price pot simmered.

Prompted chiefly by the rise in steel, five more big steel-users boosted the prices of their products. In the auto industry, Packard announced increases ranging from $92 to $200 a car, Hudson from $45 to $95, and Nash from $95 to $168.40, while Kaiser-Frazer added $99 to the price of one model. Although its home laundry washers are now so plentiful that some retailers were offering them at one-third down and up to 15 months to pay, Bendix raised prices about $10 on each model.

Driven by unfavorably hot weather, corn prices rose again. September futures on the Chicago Board of Trade soared the permissible limit of 8-c- a bushel on two different days to reach $2.38 1/3 a bushel, highest in 99 years. Spot sales jumped to $2.49, the highest since 1917, In New York

City, Market Commissioner Eugene Schulz reported pork and beef prices at an "unprecedented high level at all stages of distribution."

Such simmerings had developed so gradually that they had not alarmed most businessmen. But by last week they began to give off an ominous hiss. The Bureau of Labor Statistics index of all wholesale commodity prices rose .7 to 151.3, a new postwar high. Dun & Bradstreet's Wholesale Food Index climbed 6-c- to $6.57, just 3% lower than its alltime high last March.

To Manhattan's National City Bank, this was too close to the boiling point for comfort. In its August letter, the bank praised businessmen for their awareness of danger after the stockmarket break of last fall. "[But] this is no time," it warned, "to throw caution to the winds with the risk of inviting another inflationary spurt, from which the reaction could be a good deal more serious."

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