Business: Market Lesson

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Results. As to "results" of the break, the most important question could not be answered, i. e.: to what extent would the Bear psychology of the market spread to business generally? Through last week, optimism was certainly more pronounced than pessimism. Stock brokers were far more pessimistic than businessmen. Being, especially in the lower ranks, a provincially Manhattan lot, they seemed to think the Stockmarket would be disgraced if Business did not humbly follow its lead. Outside of lower Manhattan, Detroit was the gloomiest spot, the depths being reached by the jocular motor executive who seemed to feel that never again would any U. S. citizen be able to buy anything except a Ford. Following are three typical "results" variously predicted:

1) That Prosperity would increase because many persons would hereafter do more work and less gambling. Every large organization has contained at least one executive who paid more attention to the Market than to the work for which stock-holders presumably paid him. And thousands of independent little store owners and such have neglected their business with the result that they have sold less of the products of Big Business than they might have.

2) That funds hitherto concentrated in the Stockmarket would go into more legitimate fields (some realtors appeared to think that the public was going to build houses with the money it had lost in the market). Certainly there was much talk of a revival of interest in bonds, which have recently been spurned even by widows and orphans.

3) That the constructive wizardry of Herbert Hoover ("great engineering works") might soon be exhibited to a waiting and ready people.