"DON'T GET PANICKY"

AS ITS new president, the " U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week elected St. Louis Banker William A. McDonnell, 63, chairman of the city's First National Bank and director of McDonnell Aircraft Corp., of which his brother James S. McDonnell Jr. is president. An Arkansas cotton merchant's son, who peddled papers as a child "because I wanted to stand on my own two feet"--and now keeps them both conservatively on the ground--Banker McDonnell graduated (summa cum laude) from Vanderbilt University in 1917, worked up through Little Rock banks before moving to St. Louis in 1944, where he became the First National's president in 1948, its chairman last year.

"The recession," said McDonnell, is "probably about half over. It will be short-lived if we avoid getting panicky and rush in to do too much, too soon." The one major problem to solve is prices--they must come down. "This recession is going to be cured primarily in the market place, not on Capitol Hill." In order to speed it along, "the best things would be for labor and management to get together and declare a truce on higher wages and prices until this thing is over." The Government can be of some help, though such highly publicized recession cures as a speedup in public works are overstated benefits. "A new post office in Podunk doesn't do much for the skilled man who is unemployed in Detroit." More important, said McDonnell, who once argued that the best way to halt inflation in the U.S. economy was to increase taxes on incomes below $5,000, is a program of "sensible tax reforms." McDonnell wants temporary tax relief for all income groups and for corporations as well. Only then, says he, can "we increase the incentives for business risks and release to the fullest the creative energies of our people."

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