COMMENT: Eric Ridder, publisher of what is now known as the Knight-Ridder Newspaper chain, prepared the following report on Dr. Glenn E. Burress in a front page column that appeared in The Journal of Commerce on Wall Street on August 30, 1974. Burress had predicted in his front page weekly column that U.S. economy policy was inducing a depression for the first time since the 1930s. A depression is defined as the case where, when real income of consumers falls, their saving rate also falls. (The saving rate rises when income falls during recessions.) That forecast proved to be successful. The only other time that forecast was repeated was in February 1982. Then the 1981.3Q-1983.2Q period proved to be the second U.S. policy induced depression since the 1930s. Burress shows that like the Great Depression during 1929-41, both of these depressions could have been prevented...

THE $10 BETS by Eric Ridder Sixteen years ago a group of economic students at Harvard were arguing about why it was that three years earlier, in 1955, consumers had not behaved as they were expected to behave under the theories (then considered as being almost sacrosanct) by John Maynard Keynes. "Outside forces" were cited, as they usually are, to explain the otherwise unexplainable. But as $10 bets were offered for a more logical explanation, one of the group accepted the challenge. He was Glenn E. Burress, now visiting professor of economics at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, in Odessa, whose views you have been reading in these pages for some time now... After studying matters for awhile, Burress advanced a revised theory rejecting Keynes' "fundamental psychological law" and, as he says, "got quite excited" about what he was turning up. Well, for one reason or another, Harvard wasn't very interested. He wrote his dissertation at Cincinnati U. At first professional economists weren't interested. He gave up academics, went to Business Week, then to the American Bankers Association and then went back to university work to see, as he puts it, if it were not possible "to straddle both Wall St. and the classroom." Well, it appears he has. Quite a lot of noted economists (the list embraces a range from Walter Heller and Paul McCracken to Milton Friedman) now accept his rejection of this particular Keynesian theory and, more importantly to Prof. Burress, at least, he has collected on at least one of those 1958 $10 bets. I mention this to explain why you've seen quite a little in these pages from Prof. Burress and his colleagues ta UTPB. They are working from material (previously neglected or not previously available in some instances) that we find intriguing and highly instructive. I cannot sum it all up now, but I do think it is the type of material which proves most useful in business forecasting, which is quite a subject of speculation these days. Still, and all, you may find a special source of interest in the data on short-term business credit, special components of installment debt and to comments on the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's deflated measure of leading indicators. The forecasts you will find in our paper ... are not invariably those you find elsewhere. Indeed, they seldom are. But as our onetime editor, the late Heinze Luedecke used to say, all the clues to the Great Depression of the 1930s were there beforehand. The trouble was that we were looking for them in the wrong places. We hope now we are looking in the right ones.