NO DEPRESSION IN SIGHT IS ECONOMIST’S VIEW

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 March 1949, Page 6

NO DEPRESSION IN SIGHT IS ECONOMIST’S VIEW

NEW YORK, March 12. In spite of rising unemployment figures and declining prices throughout the nation, Government and private economists contend that no depression is in sight, and that 1949 will be a good economic year. The Bureau of Employment Security in Washington has announced, on the basis of a survey of 92 major labour market areas, that it is “moderately optimistic” about job prospects for 1949. The Bureau adds, however, that employment figures will probably not equal last year’s. Unemployment now stands at 3,200,000—the highest since the war. The New York Times today published a nation-wide survey, made bv its correspondents, which shows very little fear of a severe depression in the foreseeable future. A summary of the survey say: “By and large the country recognises that a certain slakening in the extraordinary prosperity of the last few years has set in. Unemployment has been increasing almost everywhere, yet dispatches show no sign of panic, and very little desire for Governmental action to interfere with the natural course of economic events.” Stewart Alsop, the political correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune says: “Steel production is at an all-time peak, with no end of the sellers’ market immediately in sight. Farm and food prices have just started to swing up again, as they did in 1948. The outlay for new construction in 1949 has been 8 per cent, higher than at this time m 1948. “it is most reassuring that most economists are convinced thqt a real collapse on the pattern of the early men in the Kremlin long—is out of the question for the foreseeable future.