London, Dec. 30. LESS worse is in store, European business and finance will be heartily glad to see the last of 1938—the most feverish and alarming twelve-months since the Great War. It was a year minated by the material, political and psychological preparation Ira war which nobody wants and everybody dreads.
Hence all-round.rearmament, combined with the successive shocks arising from the unresisted expansion of the German Reich, has gripped the economy of apparently every country on the Continent, both large and small.
So far as has been reported, no well-known European economist has ventured to question the estimate made by the Foreign policy Association of New York that 1938 saw Russia spending 40 per Cent. of her national income in preparing for war; Japan 37 per cent.; Germany 20 per cent.; France 9.1 per cent.; Italy 8.3 per cent, and the United Kingdom 6.
5 per cent.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.