FROM FEARS TO FACT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23277, 23 August 1937, Page 7

FROM FEARS TO FACT

Croaking about our future is a chronic habit in England, and is a time-honoured custom. The croakers are terrified by our growing prosperity, which they magnify into an alarming boom in trade, and • shake in their shoes with fear of the catastrophic slump which they tell us, is the inevitable end of every boom, writes Mr Hartley Withers, in the Financial Times. The more evidences the croakers are shown of the activity of our industries and of the well-distri-buted consuming power which is absorbing their products and asking for more, the more deeply they are convinced that we shall pay, and pay heavily, for the success with which we have climbed out of depression and started along the road to real recovery. This quaking fear of good trade, because of the imagined retribution that is supposed to follow it, is general enough to be really dangerous. So far it has chiefly affected financial circles, owing to the vulnerable state of the stock markets after a lottjßCcontinued rise in prices; if it should seep through into the minds of the organisers of industry,, it might bring about the trade recession by the mere influence of mass suggestion