Facts & Figures

Over the Moon. The Department of Agriculture predicted that meat prices, which hit a new high last month (295% of the 1909-14 average), would go even higher this summer and fall. Reasons: 1) a seasonal decline in the already low rate of production, 2) an "unusually strong" demand due to high consumer income.

A New High. Consumer credit, the Federal Reserve Board reported, rose 1.5% in May to a new high of $13.8 billion. This was chiefly due to a rise of $220 million in installment credit ($89 million of it on autos alone) to a record $6,957 million.

In the Poky. Aged (75) Hermann Roechling, who ran the Saar industries through World Wars I & II, became the first industrialist in history to be convicted of waging aggressive war. In Baden-Baden, an international court found him guilty on three counts as boss of Hitler's steel industry from 1942 on, sentenced him to seven years in prison. (Acquitted by another court on the same charge but awaiting a verdict on two other war crime counts were Alfred Krupp, No. 1 Nazi gunmaker, and eleven Krupp directors.

Down the Middle. Manhattan's National City Bank warned that inflation was hurting the "middle class" to the point of undermining its "social and civic responsibility" and "creating the seeds of depression." Taking 1930 living standards as 100, the bank reckoned that the average coal miner was now up to 191, the auto worker to 132, the teacher to 109, while the small stockholder was down to 79, the rail executive to 78, the pensioner to 65, the wealthy stockholder to 31.

Mop-Up. The Hotels Statler Co., second largest hotel chain in the U.S., mopped up behind its fast extending lines. From the Pennsylvania Railroad, for an undisclosed sum, it bought Manhattan's 2,200-room Hotel Pennsylvania, which Statler has managed since it was built in 1919.

Bittersweet. Railroad equipment makers built 10,387 freight cars for domestic use in June, for the first time this year reached their goal of 10,000 cars a month. But S. M. Felton, president of the American Railway Car Institute, was still unhappy. Dwindling steel deliveries, said he, threaten to put July production below the goal.

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