These figures show that the banks have come through a difficult year with credit to themselves and have provided the additional security which the occasion demanded at small sacrifice. They have been helped in so doing by the time lag which carried over some of the high earnings of 1937 into the early months of 1938. There is always a danger in, times of declining trade that the banks may find their temporary advances hard to liquidate. The raw materials which they have undertaken to finance during manufacture may fail to pass into consumption. The danger was increased in the present instance by a reluctance on all hands either to admit the existence of the recess sion or to apply any pressure to secure the liquidation of advances. On the other hand, supplies of so many vital raw materials are now effectively regulated and so many branches of industry stimulated by rearmament that the bank chairmen have felt justified in claiming in their recent speeches that there is little danger of the recession becoming anything like as severe as its predecesser. The chief difference is the Steel Production Off New York, Apr. 19.
Steel production for the current week was estimated at 5014 per cent. of capacity by the magazine "Iron Age" today. The magazine said the slight decline from last week, when the figure was 51% per cent, was perhaps the result of bringing production "into closer alignment with orders."
Foreign munitions buyers were said to have entered the American steel market this week for the first time since the beginning of the worldwide rearmament drive—United Press, absence of the excessive raw material stocks which prolonged the 1931 depression.
The British banks operating overseas have been subject to much the same difficulties as the home banking institutions and have met them with the same efficiency except that for them the decline in the price of agricultural and other primary commodities has been a more serious problem, and the movement of foreign balances less significant in their most recent statements; many of them also show a fall in advances and an increase in the cash ratio.. It is significant, however, that Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas) has once again increased its profit and raised its total dividend for the ar ended September 30 to 6% per cent.
compared with 6 per cent. in 1937.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.