AMERICAN BUSINESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 126, 31 May 1938, Page 12

AMERICAN BUSINESS

NERVES IN NEW YORK

WESTERNERS' CONFIDENCE

"The weakness of the New York stock market has not been engineered; it is due to genuine lack of confi-" | dence," said Mr. E. G. Harper, a Wellington business man, who returned by the Niagara yesterday from a six months' visit to the United States and Canada, and was interviewed at Auckland by the "New Zealand Herald." "The trouble is much the same as in New Zealand, over-legislation and uncertainty about what President Roosevelt will do next."

The average New York business man would not sit down to lunch at his club without first having a look at the tape machine, Mr. Harper continued. He had noticed this repeatedly when he was a guest on such occasions. The reaction was widespread; the restaurant and entertainment people, for instance, were quite sure that the bottom of everything had dropped out. However, in Chicago he found a much more confident spirit, and California seemed* outside the realm of stock prices altogether and fully assured of its own-future.

One of the adverse influences in the East was the undistributed profits tax, which made many industrial and other concerns feel insecure, because it hindered them from building up reserves. The strife, between the two rival labour forces, the American Federation of Labour and Mr. John L. Lewis's Committee for Industrial Organisation, was also a brake on recovery and on the reabsorption of the .unemployed, who amounted to about 10 per cent, of all workers last winter. On the Pacific Coast, added Mr. Harper, nearly every business man to whom he was introduced, on learning that he came from somewhere near Australia, expressed a fervent wish that he would take away Harry Bridges, the Australian leader of the longshoremen. Repeated efforts had been made to have Bridges deported as an undesirable alien, but without success. Current opinion blamed President Roosevelt's Secretary of Labour, Miss Frances Perkins, for his Sontinued presence in the country.