To the Editor of the *Nowni-Curna Dany News Sin—It_is a commonplace that there are a number of merchant Arms In Shanghai who have been making consistent losses for several years past. They are "in the hands of the banks" who continue to carry them although by so doing the banks are thereby competing against their more healthy elfents and actually depress ing prices to their own and the community's ultimate detriment. Prices, in such circumstances, are depressed because the virtually bankrupt concerns accept orders and contracts with insueient gross profits and sometimes on unjustifiable terms. By #0 doing they maintain a trickle of business sumMclent to make it appear that they are a going concern in the wrong sense of the word "going:
1 suggest, sir, that this side of the Shanghai: picture is being lost fof and thet it is high time that this latest form of cut-throat competition elltiinated.
Shanghai, March, 17.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.