Word: ackley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...industry announced price increases, only to back down when the inflation-wary Johnson Administration threatened to dump Government stockpiles on the open market. Last week, following a wave of price hikes on other basic metals, major aluminum producers decided to try again. This time the Administration reacted through Gardner Ackley, the President's chief economic adviser, who criticized what he called an "ill-timed sequence of price increases...
...Ackley apparently spoke more in sorrow than in anger-and this seems to have been the pattern in recent metal price hikes. When the leading U.S. copper companies, which had also been pressured into rolling back price hikes in 1965, announced 2?-a-lb. increases two weeks ago, Washington merely grumbled. Thus encouraged, nine steelmakers last week followed Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.'s earlier lead in raising prices on tubular products by averages of 2.5% to 3%. At the same time, the price of molybdenum, an alloy agent used in strengthening steel, was raised 3.7% by two leading producers...
While obviously unhappy about it, the Administration has pretty well exhausted both its stockpiles and its powers of persuasion. Industry, meanwhile, has learned to be more prudent. This time round, a number of the companies consulted with Washington before raising prices, then kept the increases relatively modest. And, as Ackley admitted, the copper, molybdenum and aluminum producers had patiently "held back price increases for periods ranging from six months to more than a year...
...prevent just this, a tax hike was urged privately but none too effectively by Gardner Ackley, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and publicly by such former CEA chairmen as Walter Heller, Arthur Burns and Raymond Saulnier, as well as the Federal Reserve's Chairman William McChesney Martin. Johnson rejected the advice. Administration insiders say that the President took soundings on Capitol Hill and decided that he could not persuade Congress to pass a tax increase in an election year. House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills and Senate Finance Chairman Russell Long opposed...
Massaging the Fat. Lyndon Johnson has so artfully arranged the evidence that nobody can be certain whether he intends to raise taxes or hold the line. "New numbers come in almost every day," said Ackley, and Johnson juggles them with the skill of a center-ring virtuoso. Last week, for example, aides in Austin hinted that the fiscal 1968 budget might total $140 billion-an almost certain portent of higher taxes. Almost immediately, however, they began "massaging" the fat out of that figure. Come January, and-presto!-Johnson will look like a genius if he unveils a budget...