Vagabond Editorials

ntl by Jack

In this column last issue I discussed how very, very far from normal the lumber journal business is. We read and hear a lot about the depression being over, but it hasn't rung loud on the cash register as yet. )k**

And the same thing is true about lumber. Every day people ask how the lumber business is getting along, and express huge surprise when you tell them that it is still far from prosperous, nationally speaking. There are, of course, many specific places in this country where a whole lot of building is going on. But when we speak of the condition of the lumber market we naturally mean the national situation, and not some local boom point.

***

In the first place most of the building that is being done with private capital is small stuff, residential type in new construction, with lots of fixing up going on in most places. This is very helpful to the local dealers, but doesn't cut a great deal of ice when it comes to taking care of the general production of lumber. ,F*rk

V[/hat, then, is the building situation in this country today? Well, the national authorities who spend their time keeping track of such things report that at this time a great bulk of big industry still lags, with building the greatest laggard. Building today, so they say, is 4I per cent of norrnal, employment is 86 per cent, car loadings are Z0 per cent, and store sales are 87 per cent. ***

The boom that is being shown by such industries as cigarettes, automobiles, entertainment, etc., is what we hear most about, and read a lot of. But that sort of boom is missing in the heavy goods industries.

Dionne

Naturally, when we get to talking about percentages of normal, the question always arises, what IS normal? 'We have neither the time, space, nor ability to answer that question here. Suffice it to say that the Federal Reserve Board experts, and they are the best we know of, chose 1923-25 as their base period, because they had to have some base and, during those years thefe was no war, drought, depression, or boom. So they call those years normal.

**:F

However, great changes have taken place since those years. We have had a great growth in population, and therefore normal consumption of all things should be relatively greater. In 1923 the population of this country was one hundred and eleven million people. A good rough guess today is one hundred and twenty-eight million.

So, when we get a a"rr.i"g loooa normal lumber consumption it naturally follows that there are about seventeen million more people and their possessions to be housed than there were thirteen years ago, and therefore normal consumption of the country should be much higher than then.

*rl.*

The 47 per cent of normal mentioned previously is the ratio of today's consumption against the 1923-25 consumption. But that is unfair because we have those seventeen million more people to house than we had then, so our present consumption is far less than 47 per cent of normal; the NEW normal.

Using only the nonrrl",;rr:rJ-,n, and disregarding another tremendous but nebulous growth (the growth of con- sumption produced by all of our new appetites for new things) a famous economist, Colonel Leonard Ayres, computes the deficiency in some of the current economic factors as follows:

The per cent below -".:,J of pRoDUcTIoN is TWELVE; of EMPLOYMENT is TWENTY-FIVE; of PAY ROLLS is THIRTY-ONE; of DEPARTMENT STORE SALES is TWENTY-EIGHT; of FREIGHT f-OADINGS is THIRTY-NINE; of RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION is SEVENTY-FOUR; of ALL CONSTRUCTION is FIFTY-EIGHT; of EXPORT TRADE is THIRTY-EIGHT. ***

The surprise that is frequently uttered when the fact that the lumber business has NOT yet returned to a generally prosperous level is therefore well illustrated by the above figures. Compared with what there was for several years the building business undoubtedly HAS improved a great deal. But except in specific local instances where a boom of some sort prevails, there is little prosperity yet evident in the lumber business.

Nationally considered, ,"*U"ta*, construction is still, according to the above figures, seventy-four per cent below normal. General construction presents a better comparative figure because of Government construction of larger units'

So the lumber industry must not expect to run its mills