TIME CLOCK

AJTOMAKERS' 1954 models may be postponed if the month-old Tool & Die Craftsmen's strike is not ended soon. Chrysler and Packard have already postponed their fall announcement dates, and failure to get dies from strike-bound plants has got G.M. worried.

TWENTIETH Century-Fox, which has been collecting $350 a month in royalties on seepage from an oil pool 1,500 feet below its Hollywood lot, plans more oil exploration. It has been given permission by Los Angeles officials to sink 13 wells on its property, hopes to collect royalties of $10,000 a month from each well in the next two years.

RUSSIAN feelers to reopen East-West trade in platinum are getting a chilly reception. Last week in London, the Soviet Trade Delegation offered to sell platinum for the first time since 1947, but found no takers. London dealers, who usually sell platinum to the U.S., were afraid to touch it.

JOHN L. Lewis' miners, unlike most other citizens, have never been forced to pay taxes on their $1,200-a-year pensions. Last week the Bureau of Internal Revenue ruled not only that the 60,000 pensioners must pay (retroactively to 1948) but that investment income ($768,967 last year) from the U.M.W.'s $90 million welfare fund will be taxable in fiscal 1953.

JAPAN has passed Great Britain and regained its prewar place as the world's No. 1 exporter of cotton cloth. In 1953's first three months, while Britain's exports dropped from 185 million to 173 million sq. yds., Japan's soared from 146 million to 187 million sq. yds., including a 100% increase in sales in Britain itself.

AIRLINES may soon be carrying up to 85% of all first-class mail, if Post Office experiments later this summer pan out. It is still cheaper to send mail by rail than by air (36-c- v. 52 3/4-c- an air ton-mile), but with a big volume to haul on late night flights the airlines may be able to cut their rates enough to underbid the railroads, which are asking a 45% increase for carrying mail.

THE C.I.O.'s United Steelworkers, who have often complained of steel companies' earnings, turned a pretty penny themselves last year despite the steel strike. On income of $13,752,247 from investments, initiation fees and dues, the Steelworkers netted $751,237, raising their net worth to a record $10,855,697.

FIRST fruit of the recently signed ten-year agreement between Westinghouse and Rolls-Royce (TIME, June 22) will probably be an announcement that Westinghouse will build the British Avon RA16 jet engine (9,000 lbs. thrust) which will power Britain's Comet IIIs, and possibly the new top-secret Conway, expected to have a thrust matching Pratt & Whitney's J-57, now the world's most powerful jet engine.

WALL Street Analyst Washington Dodge predicts a great bull market for "sometime in 1954" which will lift the Dow-Jones industrial average, now 270.88 "comfortably over 300." Other Dodge predictions: New York Central stock, now 25, will be selling at 37; Du Pont, now 91, at 125; Western Union, now 44 1/8, at 88; Bethlehem Steel, now 51 1/4, at 80.

REPUBLIC Steel Corp. will build a $1,000,000 plant in Toledo to make 50,000 lbs. a day of powdered iron by a new process. Precision parts (e.g., cams, gears) molded of powdered iron fuse under heat into hard, smooth shapes that need no expensive machining. If Republic, the first big steelmaker to enter the field, can produce big quantities of powdered iron cheaply, it will be good news to airplane and automakers, who never have been able to get enough.

AT the rate it is going, home-mortgage lending this year will top even the 1952 peak of $58 billion, now that the Administration has eased its tight-money policy.

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