Business: The Government’s Week: Mar. 7, 1938

Surprised and pleased last week was SEC Chairman William Orville Douglas by a sudden rush of utility holding companies to register with the commission. Though the constitutionality of the 1935 Public Utility Holding Company Act is still undecided by the Supreme Court, fortnight ago the $570,000,000 United Light & Power Co. voluntarily registered under the act. Last week two more utility holding companies knocked at SEC’s door —Engineers Public Service Co., which registered all $369,000,000 of its assets, and Cities Service Co., which asked for exemption for itself but registered the $428,000,000 assets of its two utilitysubsidiaries, Cities Service Power & Light Co. and Federal Light & Traction Co. This brought the total of utility assets registered under the act to approximately $6,800,000,000 or about 44% of the industry.

¶Summoned to Washington to confer with the Federal Trade Commission on fair trade practices for the wool industry, the National Association of Wool Manufacturers refused to attend. F. T. C. is pondering a set of fibre identification rules for wool textiles such as those which upset the rayon industry last year (TIME, Nov. 29). Said President Arthur Besse of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers : “The wool textile industry as a whole does not desire or see the need for any such trade practice conference. . . .’ F. T. C. retorted that its conference would begin on March 8.

¶At a dinner of the Young Democratic Club of New York, where rumor says he has aims at being Governor, Franklin Roosevelt’s trust-busting protege, Solicitor General-designee Robert Houghwout Jackson, spoke to Business in more conciliatory terms than usual: “The business man is not easily interested in distant reforms if he is showing losses from quarter to quarter. But the Government, whose first duty is to preserve the future of the nation, has to try to live, not from quarter to quarter, not even from decade to decade, but actually from generation to generation.

“The raw materials which might yield a bigger profit today from more intense exploitation may be the very natural resources which the nation wants to conserve to give a break to the next generation so that there may be profits tomorrow. . . .

“The real difference between the business man preoccupied with his own affairs and the Government official who feels the winds blowing from every quarter is a difference in the sense of timing. Shall we move while we can still control our direction, or shall we wait, as some European countries have waited, for events to push us around?”

¶The National Bituminous Coal Commission reluctantly revoked all the minimum soft coal prices it established only last December.

¶To familiarize new Commissioners Jerome Frank and John Hanes with a two-and-a-half-year-old Wall Street investigation upon which a decision appeared near at hand, SEC held a review of the charges that White, Weld & Co. manipulated the stock of A. 0. Smith Corp. in 1935.

¶What was apparently the first tangible result of President Roosevelt’s conferences with Big Business in the past three months came in an announcement by the Automobile Manufacturers Association inDetroit of a National Used Car Exchange Week (see col. 3). Its object: to break the used car jam which has tied up the automobile industry.