FINANCIAL NOTES
TOWARDS FULL EMPLOYMENT AT just under 1,300,000 the total numbers of the British un- employed are now back to roughly where they stood at the
peak of the 1937 boom. The fall since the beginning of this year has been little short of 69o,000. The decline is spread over all the areas of Great Britain and over nearly all the main industrial groups. The existence of a high level of industrial activity can no longer be denied, and all the factors point to a continuance for the time being of high- pressure industrial production. There is, for instance, a much less than seasonal decline in the activity of those industries like coal which are normally slack in the summer, and from many industries there come reports of an unsatisfied demand for specialist workers of various types. From a market angle these figures are bullish, even though the net of taxation is now a little more widely spread than it has been in previous boom periods. Net profits may not rise as much as they used in similar circumstances, but they can hardly fall.
So far as the official figures enable one to judge, the present figures owe their improvement very largely to public spending on rearmament, even though the effect is often at second and third hand, as in the marked recovery in the distributive trades which is doubtless inspired by the larger earnings of the em- ployed. One sees the direction of the movement in the activity of the building and constructional trades ; hutments for the militia have brought them much business which in turn has imparted itself to the timber trade, but the demand for bricks has not been outstanding, and ordinary speculative housebuild- ing shows no exceptional activity. Government orders have meant much to the steel industry, and a good deal to textiles, and there seems also to have been a reasonable increase in normal commercial orders. There might in normal times have been a brisk Stock Exchange rise on the publication of the unemployment figures. In prevailing conditions the market pays more attention to foreign news than to home activities, and recalls that a boom based on public spending must sooner or later be deprived of its foundation.
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