"It is true that food is, by comparison, plentiful. But it is also true that money or other circulating medium is unprecedently plentiful. The fact that food prices are relatively high and that the prices of chemicals, metals, lumber, etc., are relatively low, though their supply is relatively small, may be due to a concentration of purchasing power upon food, and the general direction of the flow of currency toward the purchase of immediate consumables. Some relatively minor luxuries such as jewelry (and perhaps automobiles should also be included here as the semi-luxury of greater magnitude) find favor with purchasers, but the main trend of purchase seems to bear toward demand for the necessities of life now in a finished state or nearly so, with a relatively weaker tendency toward demand of capital goods. If the supply, and also the production, of raw materials has been relatively small, and if the prices at which they have exchanged have also been relatively low, it seems obvious that the proportionate amount of currency and credit engaged in their purchase must be abnormally small, thus accounting for the ability of the producers and purveyors of food to demand abnormally high prices regardless of the relative plentifulness of their goods." CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO PROFITEERING "The conditions just described are highly favorable to both speculative profiteering and wasteful distribution, through the intervention of supernumerary middlemen and caterers. In fact, the statistics published by the New York Industrial Relations Commission seem to indicate an unusually large increase of persons engaging in certain kinds of salesmanship after the armistice. It should, however, be remembered that even though it may smack of profiteering to produce a very large crop and sell it at abnormally high prices, this is a kind of profiteering which deserves unstinted praise as compared with that other species of profiteering which deliberately reduces output in the expectation that the extortionate prices which the reduced product will command may more than make up to the producer or speculator for the portion of production withheld or the percentage of hoarded goods condemned to spoil and be lost to the nation." OTHER COMMODITIES The price of commodities other than foodstuffs was influenced in 1919 by the inadequacy of supply and the curtailment of production. This was especially true of woolens, as stated by the Council: "The most obvious explanation of the high prices of woolens is the glaring fact of the extreme reduction in output which ensued after the signing of the armistice and the completion of Army orders, which practically ended in January, 1919.