Word: auto
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rich man's racket" which made it impossible for the workingman to buy a car. With no real documentation to back him up, Reuther said that the "meat-ax approach" of Regulation W, plus cutbacks in critical materials, would throw no less than 321,000 auto workers out of work. Reuther had a meat-ax approach of his own: slap immediate controls on everything except wages...
...such a tightening could not come too soon. Despite FRB's credit pinching, bank loans kept right on rising to new alltime highs. And even though builders had hollered at Regulation X (TIME, Oct. 23), housing starts in 1951 might well be higher than FRB intended. Furthermore, the auto dealers were using old figures when they talked of slumping sales. With a threatened cut in auto output, car sales have recently spurted upward again. Nevertheless, FRB thought that tougher credit controls might check inflation-if given a chance to work...
...boosted prices on the company's 1951 models an average of 5.5% (from $87.50 on the cheapest Ford to $185 on Lincoln Cosmopolitan convertibles). Same day, General Motors Corp. raised prices an average of almost 5% on its 1951 models. These were the first price boosts among the auto industry's Big Three in nearly two years. The reason, said both companies, was simply that their material and labor costs had scooted skyward...
Actually, the furor over auto and steel prices was way out of proportion to their small effect on the cost of living. Retail food prices, which are far more important to consumers, had risen almost as much (4.3%) since Korea. But in the face of the politically potent farm bloc, no one in Washington was talking about removing farm price supports, which had helped food prices to rise...
...Swanson married at 18, had to go to work instead of college. He moved from one Chicago radio manufacturer to another, studied electronics at night school. By the time he was 23, he was a top design engineer for Chicago's Wells-Gardner & Co. (where he worked on auto radios), later made a name as a free-lance consultant on electronic equipment...