Reviews the book "Elementary Accounting," by George H. Newlove, Leo C. Haynes and John A. White.

The article presents some tentative propositions underlying consolidated reports. Consolidated financial statements, like other human institutions, have enjoyed varying degrees of popularity. From obscure beginnings they rose to a position of eminence in the financial world and were quite generally regarded as the only acceptable means by which the financial data of related business organizations could be presented to creditors, stockholders, income-tax authorities, and the public. Both the strength and the weakness of a consolidated statement lie in its ability to disclose summary information about a number of related enterprises, with a fine disregard for legal entities. Separate financial statements of individual subsidiaries must be submitted to outside stockholders if they are to be given any idea of the significance of their equities, consolidated statements mean nothing to them except insofar as a controlled profit lies in assets not yet disposed of to the public. Conditions may make one or more types of combined financial statements desirable in the published report of a controlling company. These are the overall consolidated statements, group statements of all the subsidiaries or of natural divisions of subsidiaries, and consolidating or grouping statements.

To some people an accountant is still a human adding machine. It may be true that his success is dependent to a considerable extent upon his aptitude for handling figures, but the leading positions in this profession rest in the hands of those who combine this aptitude with an even more important qualification, the ability to negotiate. Students specializing in accounting are, for the most part, woefully ignorant of the necessity of developing this ability and therefore concentrate on the theory as found in books and in problems to the exclusion of experience in making contacts with individuals. Students who have a natural aptitude for dealing with people sometimes avoid accounting as a career because they are not sufficiently familiar with the satisfaction, which an accountant experiences in the way of contacts. Therefore, many young men who would succeed as accounting executives select other careers because they want jobs in which they meet people rather than those pore over figures all day long.

The article focuses on business-law training for students of accounting. Faced with the ever increasing complexities of modem civilization, society has relied very largely on the device of specialization for the solution of its problems. This specialization has given rise to a problem of its own, and without in any way detracting from the splendid achievements of specialists, venture to suggest that there is a serious need in the social organization of today for the coordination of the activities of the various specialists. The respective problems of the legal and accounting professions indicate the author's point, and because of the close relationship between the two professions in certain lines of endeavor, it is essential that the respective viewpoints of the two professions be coordinated. This necessity has been universally recognized in the inclusion of law study in the curricula in the schools of business administration, and recognize to a certain extent by a display of interest on the part of law schools in the teaching of accounting.

Reviews the book "The Causes of Economic Fluctuations," by Willford I. King.