AMERICAN STOCK MARKET

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23514, 31 May 1938, Page 12

AMERICAN STOCK MARKET

WEAKNESS NOT ENGINEERED POLITICAL UNCERTAINTY RESPONSIBLE WELLINGTON BUSINESS MAN’S VIEWS (Special to Daily Times) ■ AUCKLAND, May 30. •The weakness of the New York Stock Market has not been engineered; it is due to a genuine lack of confidence,” said Mr E. G. Harper, a Wellington business man, who returned by the Niagara from a six months’ visit to the United States and Canada.” The trouble is much the same as in New Zealand—overlegislation 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 ticker machine, Mr Harper continued. He had noticed this repeatedly when he was a guest on such occasions. The reaction was widespread. Restaurant and' entertainment people, for instance, were quite sure that the bottom of everything had dropped out. In Chicago, however, 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 ■bout 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 ■omewhere near Australia, expressed a fervent wish that he would take awaV 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 continued presence in the country.