Charles B. Ray

Charles B. Ray was an engineer and business counselor in Chicago. He was one of the first to recapture the dimensions of the American system of economics. An obvious student of Fredrick Soddy, Ray was also associated with Sears-Roebuck, the catalog and counter giant.

Ray reasoned that most of the economic equation had to do with providing goods and services for the nation's households. Ray started his research in 1932. By 1936, he could predict national income with practical accuracy six months in advance. How? He discovered one factor that telegraphed all that was to follow. That factor was the annual physical farm production and the other raw materials production necessary to a developed society and the first-sale prices of those raw materials. He connected the parity concept of farm commodity prices and the use of government regulated floor prices as the missing links to sustained national prosperity and full employment.

Ray was instrumental in discovering a state-of-the-art multiplier for raw materials. He called it a "trade turn." It is a moving constant that adjusts itself to changes in technology. This natural multiplier can only be set aside by inserting debt into the equation, and debt cannot be sustained because compound interest operates outside the laws of physics over time.

Ray's pioneering computations proved that with farm raw materials at parity in 1929, factory employment and national income obeyed the laws of the multiplier and reached an economic state of equilibrium at full employment. Three years later, a decline in the governing factor caused an induced decline across the board in the American economy -- the Great Depression.

Ray took his work to U.S. Tariff Commissioner, Dr. John Lee Coulter, the second great Founding Father of the National Organization for Raw Materials. And they eventually joined forces with Carl H. Wilken, another of the original "Founding Fathers."