Business & Finance: Reappraisal

Last week the stockmarket was running into the fourth week of a dragging decline. This week a number of developments including the French elections (see p. 22) and President Roosevelt's "economics" speech (see p. 13) caused the sharpest recession since July 1934, with representative stocks dropping from one to nine points on the New York Stock Exchange. Since early April the Standard Statistics stock average has dropped from 124.9 to 110.9. After more than a year of rising prices such a reaction was not precisely surprising. However, the market's downward drift was accompanied by something more than long faces in brokers'...