Word: businessmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Du Font's 40-year-old ownership of 23% of General Motors stock violated the 1914 Clayton Act (TIME, June 17), U.S. businessmen have been fretting over just how far the Justice Department will try to push the new decision. Last week they could breathe a little easier. In a carefully prepared speech Robert A. Bicks, a top member of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, told the American Bar Association that the Government would take a long, hard look before trying to upset other longstanding affiliations. Said Bicks...
What worried businessmen most was that trustbusters might attempt to divorce old and happy corporate liaisons, whether set up by stock purchase (as in the Du Pont case) or by the acquisition of other assets, for fear that they could produce a monopoly. Bicks soothed their fears. Though Section 7 of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act as amended in 1950 covers all asset acquisitions (it previously covered stock only), the amendments state clearly that "nothing contained in this action shall be held to affect or impair any right heretofore legally acquired." Therefore, he reasoned, a great many...
...many U.S. businessmen-and politicians-the most pressing economic problem of 1957 is the increasing tightness of money, which last week drove the interest rate on U.S. Treasury bonds to the highest point in nearly 25 years (see above). Yet tight money, which economists define as a shortage of available capital to meet the demands of an expanding economy, is not a peculiar phenomenon of the great American boom. As gauged by interest rates, the U.S. actually has easier money than 23 other major nations. The entire free world is caught in the grip of an unparalleled capital shortage that...
While U.S. firms with high credit ratings can still make short-term loans at 4%, British businessmen must pay 51%. In Germany, Japan, France, Brazil and Greece, interest rates run anywhere from 7% to 12%. For smaller companies, the effective rate often is much higher, reaching 25% or more annually. Even at such rates, demand so far outstrips supply that companies are hard-pressed for expansion capital, are turning increasingly to profits to get the funds they need. In Britain, West Germany and Belgium, some businessmen are plowing up to 60% of all profits back into their firms...
...basic reason for the capital shortage is that the free world is riding the crest of a postwar boom, and the great demand is to expand and industrialize at once. Enormous technological breakthroughs in almost geometrical progression force businessmen everywhere to search for capital to buy new equipment and materials. And with more jobs and higher pay than ever before, the effective demand of consumers with money to spend and the will to spend it has created vast new markets. In their rush to produce and buy, businessmen and consumers have pushed many a nation into serious inflation (see FOREIGN...