Topple

The Russo-Finnish crisis having lapsed temporarily into the name-calling stage, big bad news in the Baltic last week came from Sweden. There the national budget, for years as soundly balanced as the Great Wallendas, was shown to have taken a terrific topple from the high wire. Loss of revenues due to wartime trade curtailment, plus the cost of keeping the Army and Navy mobilized for emergency, plus armament purchases and providing urban Swedes with gas masks and air-raid shelters, had largely done the job. Finance Minister Dr. Ernst Wigforss announced that since he reported balance to the Riksdag last January, the Kingdom had fallen in the red 600,000,000 kroner ($144,000,000).

The total expenditure carried in Sweden's last normal budget was 1,340,000,000 kroner. Dr. Wigforss asked the Riksdag to authorize a loan of 300,000,000 kronor, and plans to raise the remaining 300,000,-ooo needed to cover his "emergency deficit" by drastic taxation, particularly by upping the already high and unpopular Swedish taxes on liquor, tobacco, coffee, sugar. Liquor is sold by the famed Swedish State Monopoly and in angry protest at the deficit taxes last week 200 sailors from the Swedish battleship Manligheten ("Manhood") returned their motbocker or liquor ration books to the State stores.

Sweden's large-scale purchases of munitions, fuels, certain foods and other "preparedness goods" were revealed to have run up during the past nine months an import balance of 345,000,000 kronor, whereas for the similar period last year Sweden's surplus of imports over exports was only a mildly depressing 140,000,000. Since War II broke, Dr. Wigforss revealed, Sweden has lost roughly 300,000,000 kronor of foreign exchange, due partly to "hot money" withdrawals by investors who are afraid the Soviet Union will yet muscle into Scandinavia as it has into the Baltic States.

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