No Parking Here

General Motors Corp. announced last week that it will sell $300 million in debentures next month, partly to finance a "high level" of corporate expansion. For giant G.M., which has already spent $1 1/4 billion for new plant and equipment in the last four years, the announcement meant that there will be no letdown in the company's growth program. The issue will be the biggest industrial offering ever made to the U.S. public, and will represent the first long-term debt G.M. has had since 1949, when it retired the last of its notes.

G.M. apparently was little concerned over talk of recession and the fact that the gross national product (total value of goods and services produced in the U.S.) turned down in the third quarter of this year for the first time since the end of 1949. The Commerce Department reported that the G.N.P. was at the annual rate of $369 billion during the three months, down $3.5 billion from the preceding quarter, but still $24 billion higher than a year ago. Main reason for the drop: businessmen cut down buying for inventory. However, consumer spending remained at the high annual rate of $231 billion, the same as in the second quarter.

There were other signs of continued boom. Retail sales in October were 6% higher than in September, and 1% above the level a year ago. Oil-company executives, meeting in Chicago, estimated that the industry's expansion next year will equal or exceed this year's $2.8 billion in capital outlays. And Government economists predicted construction will reach a whopping $34 billion in 1954, just a shade under this year's alltime high of $34.7 billion.

Sales of passenger cars in 1954, said Chrysler Corp. President Lester Lum Colbert, will reach 5,000,000 "and perhaps several hundred thousand more." Said "Tex" Colbert: "The big overwhelming reason for optimism is that the whole economy is at the beginning of a great era of growth, not at the end . . . Economic progress, once it gets rolling, never finds a place to park and rest."

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