STATE OF BUSINESS: Boom

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Coal. Typical of industries doing so well that they were selling on a 24-hour basis, with no prices guaranteed for longer, is sick old King Coal. Exports (mostly to neutrals' deprived of coal supplies from belligerents) are competing with forward buying by worried U. S. fuel users. Hampton Roads (Va.), which has not been a big coal port for years, took foal from Pocahontas mines at the rate of 433,066 tons a week (current Pocahontas weekly production: 6-to-700,000 tons a week). Hampton Roadsters worked days, nights and Sundays loading ship holds and bunkers. Pennsylvania Railroad's Norfolk & Western Railway has been setting a new coal loading record daily. Mine owners have forgotten restriction agreements, are trying to get onto a six-day week. Chief obstacle: the labor supply, long unemployed and insecure, of Appalachian coal fields is now insufficient. Last week, for the first time since immigration days, mine owners were broadcasting daily appeals for miners and foremen.

Copper. But on the outskirts of the buying rush stand some industries which have already passed the peak mark of sales, are declining. Typical is copper, which the Allies have passed by in favor of purchases from African, Chilean, and Canadian sources; Germany, in favor of Balkan metal. In September copper sales had set an all time record (183,627 tons). Copper sellers sagely guarded against White House strictures on profiteering by stabilizing the price at 12¢ a pound. They guarded against overproduction by rationing customers. By the beginning of October sales had gone as low as 4,000 tons a day from a September peak of 16,830.

Most copper men, glad that they had had their innings, were content to give their customers a chance to work off the loads bought in July and September. Not so Phelps Dodge's Louis Gates, whose customers left him high and dry last spring (TIME, May 22) when he refused to follow his competitors' price cut to 10¢. Last week poker-playing Gates showed that he believes in flexible prices—on the up side. He posted a price of 12½¢, panicked consumers to come back into the market for more inventory. Reluctantly Kennecott and Anaconda, both with lower costs han Phelps Dodge, followed the price up, while frightened consumers bought still more. Small copper fabricators, worried, ike small steelmen, about the rising price and shortened supplies of their raw material, began to exert political pressure on Washington to halve the 4¢ a pound copper tariff, in order to unfix the copper market by bringing 6 to 8¢ Chilean and Canadian Copper in. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his eye on scrap and steel as much as on copper, addressed another letter to Wyoming's Senator Joseph ("Dear Joe") O'Mahoney, charged his Temporary National Economic Committee to guard against price profiteering. This time the President meant business.