BRAZIL: Atlas Luis

While Brazilian Consul-General Sebastaio Sampaio did his best to soothe with fine words New York’s unruly coffee market, President Washington Luis Pereira de Souza of Brazil struggled in Rio de Janeiro with a coffee crisis twice as acute, infinitely more ominous.

The country’s prosperity is almost entirely dependent on coffee. Mountains of brown beans in Brazilian coffee warehouses, the certainty that the monopolistically raised price of coffee could not long withstand overproduction, caused the coffee market to crack fortnight ago (TIME, Oct. 28).

Working like a beaver President Luis strove to avert catastrophe. Timorous coffee brokers announced that the coffee exchanges of Santos and Rio de Janeiro would suspend trading ‘”indefinitely.” Came urgent messages from President Luis. The exchanges reopened. Frenzied coffee speculators begged the President to save the coffee situation by declaring a general moratorium. This he flatly refused to do, patiently explained how ruinous to Brazil’s commercial credit such action would be. The result of the week’s alarums and pronouncements seemed to leave President Luis, like Atlas, supporting Brazil’s top-heavy coffee market on his own slight shoulders.