Business As Usual

Nazi Germany's invasion of France and the Low Countries last week made many items of business news seem less important than they really are. Some of them :

ANDDespite a bearish pounding taken by the stockmarket, an investment banking syndicate headed by Wall Street's Morgan Stanley & Co., Inc. sold most of a $75,000,000 issue of U. S. Steel debentures in one day, but still had about $7,000,000 of them left at week's end.

AND Montgomery Ward & Co., Inc. took one look at the markets (where Ward com mon closed the week at 37!) and pigeon holed plans to sell a $31,000,000 issue of common' stock, at $40 a share.

ANDOn some 12,500 items in its midsummer sale "flyer" catalogue, Sears, Roebuck & Co. dropped prices an average 11.2% under its January spring & summer catalogue.

Price reduction range: from 7.09% on tires to 26.64% on drugs.

> Up 54% over last May were FHA mortgages up for appraisal accurate barometer of residential building. Up 15% were sales of big makers of asphalt roofing, asbestos roofings and sidings, cement, gypsum products, insulating lines, other building materials. Fillip: all of their out put was for immediate consumption, not dealers' stocks.

ANDSEC and investment trusters came out of a huddle cooing, agreed on recommendations to make to the Senate for legislation regulating the industry.

AND Perused by ICC was the application of a new Delaware corporation named Trans port Co. for permission to consolidate over 20 Atlantic seaboard trucking firms (employes 30,000; total '39 gross, $40,000.000) into one $25.000,000 firm. The deal: Transport Co. to buy the truckers for about 75% cash, balance in common & preferred stock of the new company. AND Be-goggled Detroiter Emmett Francis ("Spike") Connely, head of First of Michigan Corp., became first paid president of conservative Investment Bankers Association. Rumored maximum salary: $40,000 a year. He authored and will promote I. B. A.'s new publicity program, tell the public that New Deal business regulation is hurting business, not helping it.

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