Word: cartel
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Chief buyers were not individual big names but a small, mysterious cartel of French and Dutch art dealers who were suspected of acting for interests in the U. S. Highest price paid (by Editor Alfred M. Frankfurter of the U. S. Art News) was $39,400 for the famous van Gogh Self Portrait which used to hang in the State Gallery at Munich. Manhattan Dealer Pierre Matisse paid $945 for his famed father's Three Women, from the Folk Museum at Essen. Principal acquisitions of the Franco-Dutch cartel were Picasso's Soler Family (1903), from Koln...
Potash politics come easy to Europe's masters of power politics. Europe's Cartel is about two-thirds Potash Syndicate of Germany, some French, less Polish. Its bankers are British. Spain, an independent producer, thoroughly undercut the trust's prices in 1933 and 1934. But in the spring of 1935 the Syndicate, thanks to German control of Spain's oldest potash company, made a tentative deal with Spain. Immediately the world price snapped back from its trade...
This deal was soon voided when Spain's Republican Government nationalized the potash fields. Since Russian potash (fully occupied feeding the soil of the steppes) was the only other European rebel against Cartel discipline, German and French potash magnates sniffed the rise of a rival Socialist combine. So did their London bankers and sales agents-J. Henry Schroder & Co.-a firm which is an economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis. Franco's victory ended their fears, brought Spain back into the potash axis...
...against one another, banded together more firmly than ever to keep the expanding U. S. potash industry from depriving them of the U. S. market. U. S. consumption in 1938 was 467,000 tons (15% of world production) which provided $23,260,400 worth of business, with the Cartel cut down to $13,512,110. Down came the Syndicate's U. S. price (50? to $1.75 a ton) on three important grades...
...sudden discovery that it had a real rival in the U. S. potash industry is the fact that U. S. production has been subsidized by no tariff. Had the foreign producers not set up monopoly prices, the U. S. industry might have grown more slowly, but the Cartel's greed was all the "protection" that the infant industry needed. The Syndicate's final stupidity was to maintain its prices during the 1938 depression. As a result its sales to the U. S. fell from 351,445 tons to 193,609 tons (45%), while sales of domestic potash expanded...