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Focuses on the move of the author to compute and analyze rate of return. Claim of the author on the lack of attention given to the rate of return; Role of rate of return as basis of determining changed needs of investor and consumer; Use of any rate of return as payment for three services: interest, assumption of risk, and the cost of raising capital; Emphasis of the author of the desirability of a flexible rate of return.

This article informs that the Excess Profits Tax Act of 1950 was enacted to help meet the need for revenue by taxing corporate profits considered attributable to current mobilization spending. All corporation net income is made subject to the normal tax and surtax, and, in addition, profits above "normal" are taxed at the "excess" profits rate of thirty percent. The statute permits corporations which come within standards defining an abnormally low base-period earnings record to calculate the tax on a substitute earnings record derived from the base-period rate of return for the taxpayer's industry. The use of an industry rate of return as a substitute for actual earnings by corporations having a subnormal base-period profits record represents a sharp departure from the World War II method of measuring relief.

The article focuses on the progress of the law on no par value stock. The device of stock without par value may be regarded as the result of efforts to mitigate the frauds on investors sometimes attending the sale to the public of par value stock. It has been strongly attacked and warmly defended. Without analyzing in detail the arguments advanced by its opponents or friends, it seems sale to say that it increases the difficulties of selling a piece of paper to the gullible for more than its real worth. From the legal point of view a certificate of no par value stock is closer to truth than one alleging a fixed value.

The article discusses on the effect of the recent decisions of the supreme court on reproduction cost as a test of value. The recent Supreme Court cases would appear to have settled one important question of constitutional law, and to have raised without settling one equally, perhaps more, important question of evidence. Unless the Supreme Court sees fit to substitute the views so forcibly expressed in the minority opinion in the South-Western Telephone case for the less skillfully presented majority opinion, that they must assume that the present value of the company's property, rather than the capital invested in the business, is to be taken as the base value in a rate case.