Word: benchmarks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most startling and significant example of this change in underlying trends is the price of oil. Nothing did more to propel inflation ever higher during the 1970s than the success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in raising the benchmark price of a barrel of crude from $1.80 in 1970 to $34 now. Besides the skyrocketing increases in retail prices of gasoline, the spiral helped drive up everything from apartment rents, which are affected by fuel costs, to the price of food, which is hauled to supermarkets in diesel-burning trucks...
Normally, interest rates ease back during periods of economic slowdown, as credit demands by businesses and individuals decline. But except for a brief period late last year, rates have not declined much at all, and now they are headed up again. Several major banks last week raised the benchmark prime lending rate another .75%, to 16.5%. The jumps have been extremely discouraging for the Administration, since a downward trend in rates is necessary to spur the business investment boom that Reaganomics needs. The latest interest rate increases have also renewed worries in Western European countries that their costs of borrowing...
Wall Street had more topsy-turvy times last week. On Monday the major banks raised the benchmark prune interest rate they charge many business clients a half point to 19.5%. Immediately the Dow Jones industrial stock average fell 13 points to 963, continuing its drop of 61 points in less than a month. But later in the week the Dow rallied 23 points to close at 986. Bond prices, which had plunged some 7.5% since the end of March, also slumped on Monday but came back to finish up about 2% for the week...
...many social programs. The lure for conservative Democrats is that Jones' proposal includes only a one-year tax cut and projects a much smaller budget deficit of $24.7 billion for 1982. Reagan, however, insisted that this plan was just "an echo of the past rather than a benchmark for the future...
...ministers of the 13-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are gathering this week. The occasion will be OPEC's 59th ministerial meeting since the cartel was founded in 1960. Looming over all other discussions: whether to push up the cost of oil beyond the $30 Saudi benchmark price and the $37 per bbl. ceiling price set in June...