SUMMARY.

7

discrimination against their trade, American manufacturers, and
specially the smaller producers, are frequently at a decisive disadvantage
 In export trade.

FOREIGN BUYING COMBINATIONS WHICH DEPRESS AMERICAN EXPORT
PRICES.

In various markets American manufacturers and producers must
deal with highly effective combinations of foreign buyers. Thus exporters
 of lumber find such combinations in Australia .and on the
Continent of Europe. Cottonseed products are handled by combinations
 of buyers in Holland, Denmark, and Germany; and Austrian
cotton-textile manufacturers have a buying combination to import
their raw cotton. The Cooperative Wholesale Society (Ltd.), an
astonishingly comprehensive wholesale buying organization maintained
 by 1,400 cooperative societies in Great Britain, has one buyer
in New York who annually purchases millions of dollars’ worth of
American products. Four London firms, known as the Fixing
Board, daily set the price of silver for the world, and American
mining companies must sell their silver for either the English or
the great Indian market to one of these four houses. For years the
copper trade of the world has been ruled by a vast German metalbuying
 organization centering in the Metallbank und Metallurgische
Gesellschaft A. G., of Frankfort on the Main. This combination
has subsidiary and affiliated companies in Germany, England,
France, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Africa, and Australia, controls
 copper and lead mines and smelters in the United States,
Mexico, and other countries, and works in agreement with other
(German metal-buying concerns.
These combinations naturally make individual American producers
bid against each other, and are thus able to buy at comparatively low
prices. According to the president of one of the largest American
copper companies, the German metal-buying combination, by such
tactics as these and by the manipulation of the foreign future
markets, has bought millions of tons of American copper at prices
averaging, over a series of years, nearly a cent a pound below the
prices paid by American consumers.

EXPORTATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES.

A considerable part of the export trade of the United States consists
 of raw or semifinished materials obtained from natural resources
 of limited supply. It is urged by many that if cooperation
among exporters of such materials is established it will tend to
increase the price received for such exports and enable the producers
to reduce the wastes of production not only to the profit of the