Word: boom
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...buys land in Iowa today is a fool." The speaker, naturally, was an Iowa dirt farmer, sounding off last week on the rip-roaring boom in farm lands. He still remembered the World War I boom, in which Iowa land went to $255 an acre-and the bust, when it dropped to $69. So many went broke that in the early 1930's insurance companies held an area equal to eight Iowa counties. But others forgot to remember. Even in Iowa, fat with corn and hogs, a man could not make a long-term profit on land that cost...
...boom was even higher elsewhere. In South Carolina and Kentucky, land prices had more than doubled. In Montana they were up 82%. Farmers did most of the buying to cash in on skyhigh food prices, but everybody seemed to be nudging the new boom...
Cash on the Barrelhead. As yet, most farm experts viewed the boom with only mild alarm. Most of the farm-buying was for cash (in World War I, farmers sometimes had three and four mortgages on their land), and instead of sinking all their World War II profits in new land, farmers were using it to pay off mortgages on the old. Now, almost half of U.S. farmers own their land outright and mortgages on the rest are down to $5.5 billion, half the peak...
What might have caused alarm was the speed with which the average price of farm land had risen. By November 1945, land prices were 58% higher than in 1939. (During the comparable World War I period, the rise was only 36%.) If prices follow the pattern of the last boom, the steep climb is just starting...
...Boom Is On. Similar foxhole dreams were hatching into fledgling airlines all over the nation. Many of the 350,000 pilots trained during the war wanted to stay in aviation. But most need additional training to step into commercial flying jobs, even if there were any open. (U.S. airlines now have only 5,000 pilot jobs.) Nor did they like what was left-$30-a-week jobs at airline ticket counters...