Business & Finance: Omens

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As unavoidable as Christmas crowds are the year-end sound-offs of industrial leaders and soothsayers. Among the few whose remarks are taken seriously is Colonel Leonard Porter Ayres, vice president of Cleveland Trust Co. Last week Colonel Ayres was not impressed by a 50¢ rise in scrap prices and the first rise since August in the New York Times business index. Like some M.Ps. in Britain (see p. 14), he predicted mainly gloomy things for the U. S.:

"It seems probable that the bottom of the present slump in industrial production will be reached in the first half of next year, for operations have been curtailed so rapidly that in many lines we are already producing less than we are consuming. The recovery from that low point is bound to be much slower than the descent to it has been."

For automobiles, coal, steel and cement production, car loadings, department store sales, he predicted next year would be worse than this. For petroleum refining, unemployment and business failures he predicted increases. For electric power and tobacco products little change.

"Recovery depends," he declared, "on the raising of new enterprise capital by private financing, and on the closely related matter of new and private construction. Even if recovery regains good momentum next year it seems unlikely that it can do so rapidly enough to lift the figures for new capital and new construction above those of 1937."