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Show Economic Highlights Happenings Thai Affect Dinner Pails And Pay Checks tm IT will certainly not come as a shock to newspaper readers to be told that the great postwar spending boom is but a shadow of its former lusty self. It has tapered off in almost all lines, and in some fields it has practically prac-tically come to a halt. Many of the present speculations of economists econ-omists deal with thequestion of whether we are approaching a depression or a recession the latter being, of course, a sort of midget-size depression. Opinion on this runs the whole gamut, from the optimists who think business and employment will hold at high levels, after certain "corrective readjustments" are made, to the. pessimists who forecast fore-cast darkly that what is coming will make the '30s look like giddy gid-dy prosperity. Regardless of the guesswork, some of the economic facts of the time are worthy of sober thought. One of the best summings-up recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, under the by-line, of a staff correspondent, correspon-dent, Vermont Roystcr. Mr. Royster, whose sources are largely governmental, starts out by observing that "the nation's na-tion's families are going back to the. old American custom of living liv-ing off next week's paycheck." What this means is that the cash buyer, whose name was legion during and immediately after the war, is becoming harder and harder to find. During 1946. consumer con-sumer credit increased by $2,-400,000,000. $2,-400,000,000. In March of this year installment credit alone jumped $70,000,000 and was 65 per cent higher than in the same month in 1945. In other words, the American family is returning to the little down and a long time to pay system of buying what it wants. As is to be expected under these conditions, savings are dwindling. According to Mr. Royster, nearly half of the $25 government bonds purchased in 1945 had been redeemed a year later, and the rate seems to be increasing. And where, in 1945, the nation's families were, saving sav-ing nearly 24 per cent of their income, in-come, the rate has slipped down to 10 per cent about where it was in 1940. It is highly significant signifi-cant that this has occurred in spite of wage increases for most workers, and indicates just how tough the rise in the cost of living liv-ing has been on the typical family. fam-ily. The volume of business is showing signs of suffering from these trends. As is to be expected, businesses of the luxury character char-acter have been hit hardest so far. A long time ago the night clubs and the taverns began to feel a pinch. Amusement enterprises enter-prises have been subjected to the bleak wind of declining patrqn-age. patrqn-age. And now semi-luxuries are facing a steady drop in purchasing. purchas-ing. i IN more stable lines, business is still good, but there are clouds on the horizon. Production is rapidly making up the backlog in the majority of lines, and has more than caught up in some. Retailers are buying much more carefully than in the past. Inven tories are growing rapidly in both wholesale warehouses and on the shelves of stores. Once hard-to-get items men's shirts and nylon stockings are good examples ex-amples are now in almost super-abundance. Mr. Royster says that "the building boom, counted on to take up the reconversion slack, has failed to live up to expectations." expecta-tions." This was one of the great fiascos of the postwar economy. The experts confidently figured that millions of homes and other residential units, to say nothing of a vast amount of industrial construction, would be needed. It may still be needed but people just won't pay the current prices if there is any way to avoid it. Many a retuning veteran who thought in terms of the kind of home you could buy in 1940 for eight or ten thousand dollars, found that an equivalent home cost twice that and often more. His GI loan wasn't sufficient to finance the kind of house he had pictured in his mind's eye, and his income wasn't enough to make the monthly amortization payments. So, if he could find any kind of a place to live, he didn't build or buy. Trouble ahead is forecast for ambitious residential sub-divisions where the costs of the houses and other developments outran the estimates esti-mates by an incredible amount. On top of that, many people, including in-cluding GIs, who. did buy on1 small down payments, have given giv-en up and are letting the properties proper-ties go. They simply can't afford to pay for and maintain them. Mr. Roystcr says the unemployed unem-ployed now total 2,400,000 people. peo-ple. The trend is up though not alarmingly so as yet. The Bureau Bur-eau of Labor Statistics now concedes con-cedes that the number of workers work-ers gainfully employed this summer sum-mer will be below earlier predictions. pre-dictions. This is inevitable in the light of conditions. Some producers, such u , motor-car companies still it." big backlogs of orders and ,Ve are no problem. But that mean that everything Manufacturers and dealL 0sy' definitely worried aVto will happen once the backW wiped out. Many a prbsSt buyer has shaken his h&S sight of the price tags on ? 1 new cars. Thousands u5n andsdof orders have 3 I What it all adds up to is , J . the basic cost of just plab ?S is absorbing most of the avSK2 'family's income, and tt haTSS and less left for other thlJ?1 That is the growing probfe have not yet been able to |