PROSPERITY COMING

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17954, 5 December 1932, Page 9

PROSPERITY COMING

BRITAIN LEADS WAY STEEL MAGNATE SAYS SLUMP IS OVER LONDON, Oct, 20. _ Mr Cha.rJos M. Schwab, the millionaire American steel magnate, friend of Kitchener, Fisher, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, and one of England’s most valuable allies during the war, is hack in London after an absence of five years.

Mr Schwab is 70 years old, and this makes his eighty-fourth trip across the Atlantic.

lie comes with a message of hope and comfort for the business mail, the industrialist, and the manufacturer. “Things are on the move both in Great Britain and the United States of America,” is his considered opinion. “America has seen the bottom of the slump and Great Britain is making more progress than any other country in the world.”

Now Mr Schwab does not. talk for talking’s sake. He is the head of the great Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and has built up interests worth £165,000,000. He has his finger on the business pulse of both sides of the Atlantic, and knows which way the wind is blowing.

Mr Schwab passed on his optimism to a press representative. “In all niy 52 years in business I have never seen anything like the recent depression,” he said. “My own ■oncern, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the second largest in the -world, has lost money for the first time in its existence. There is not any kind of business that has not been hit, and many of the hi very badly hit.

“END IN SIGHT” “But the 'people who should know best in America all agree that the end is in sight, “We shall soon be round the corner ami on the road to better times. If the bottom has not already been knocked out of the slump it very soon will

“I could give you a number of reasons for this viewpoint. But here are two of the safest. “There is a steady increase in the consumption of electrical 'power. That means industrial improvement. And railway car loadings have been going u)i every month for some time. That’s another sure sign. “In three weeks, when the elections are Over, there will he a big improvement in America, and Great Britain is hound to feel the reaction. A wave of prosperity in America is hound to reach this country. And of all countries Great Britain is winning in the race for trade recovery.

“That is what business and financial men in America are saying, and 1 believe it.”

Mr Schwab prides himself on the fact that he forecast the Ottawa agreements as long ago as 1928. good empire business “'Yes, 1 foretold years ago that there would be wider preferences within the Empire. To me it was inevitable. Besides being good business, it is only natural that all these great nations should trade together to the advantage of each single one.

“The Ottawa agreements are going to hit America—they are going to hit my own concerns, especially in the Canadian markets. But we must take the wide view. If the British Empire prospers under these agreements, America and all the rest of the world must prosper in the long run.” Mr Schwab is to be presented tomorrow with the Melche.it .Medal for 1032 for his services in developing the world’s iron and steel industry. Tie will receive it at a .banquet given by the Institute of Fuel. In 1928 he received the Bessemer gold modal of the British Iron and Steel Institute.