THE CZECHOSLOVAK REVIEW | ||
E. F. Prantner, Editor and Publisher | ||
Entered as second class matter April 30, 1917 at the Post Office of Chicago, Ill., under act of Congress of March 3, 1879. | ||
| 20 Cents a Copy | To Foreign Coutries $2.25 | $2.00 Per Year |
| Vol. IV | DECEMBER, 1920 | No. 12. |
Position of Czechoslovakia
Within the past eighteen months American investors have purchased millions and millions of marks of German municipal bonds and other securities for the obvious purpose of profiting by the unprecedented situation in foreign exchange. How many of them have taken the trouble to compare the financial and commercial position of Germany with that of her new neighbor to the South? Very few, evidently, or we should have had an American demand for Czechoslovak bonds that would have exhausted the available supply at moderate prices in short order.
The reason this has not happened is apparent to anyone who has discussed Czechoslovakia with the average American who has for one reason or another made a special study of European commercial geography. I have heard reasonably well-informed business men ask whether Czechoslovakia was formerly a part of Austria-Hungary or of the German Empire and admit that, while they had read a good deal in the newspapers about Czechoslovakia and Jugo Slavia, they never could remember which was which. I have seen a letter from the United States addressed to “Prague, Hungary, Austria”.
No wonder then that an American studying the new map of Europe is surprised to find Czechoslovakia almost as large as Austria and Hungary combined. No wonder that American capital is only beginning to find its way into this new country, inhabited though it is, by old friends.
Having for some time been impressed with the possibilities for profit by investment in Czechoslovakia at prevailing rates of exchange, I determined several months ago to visit the country and study conditions there at first hand to confirm, so far as possible, the favorable opinion formed by a study of the available statistics regarding resources and productions.
In any consideration of the economic position of a nation, its agriculture must be given first place. This would seem to be particularly true today when the people of the entire world, because of the Great War, have been concentrating so large a part of their energy on the development of industry, necessarily to some extent at the expense of the farms. We have seen negro laborers deserting the cotton plantations of the South for the factories of Cleveland or Chicago and farm workers from Northern Connecticut move to Bridgeport, and we have seen plants manufacturing everything from automobiles to shoe laces, doubling and trebling their capacity without perhaps realizing that this same migration of labor and expansion of industry have been practically world-wide phenomena. If, as a reaction from this unbalanced situation, we find farm products stubbornly maintaining the high cost of living while the prices of manufactured commodities are cut right and left, it should occasion no surprise and the economic strength of a nation which raises its own supply of food-stuffs should be obvious.
- ↑ Mr. White is Vice-President of J. G. White & Co., Inc., Investment Bankers.
