Word: copper
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
Mobutu turned all the company's copper-mining installations and other assets over to a new Congolese company, gave it a ten-man board of directors composed entirely of Congolese, and made the Congolese government the majority stockholder. He thus precipitated a crisis that, if allowed to develop, could plunge the Congo into economic and political chaos. "If we have to go hungry to be free and independent," he said, "then we'll go hungry. We prefer to remain poor and free to being rich slaves...
Pointed Question. The Congo will indeed be poor unless it can keep Union Minière's mines, which produce more than 6% of the world's copper and 60% of its cobalt, running efficiently. In Brussels, the company reacted by withholding more than $10 million in royalties that it owes the Congo and ceasing its tax payments, which amount to about $2,000,000 a month. It also declared that it would regard any of the copper that is purchased from Mobutu's company by other countries as stolen property to be recovered in the courts...
...would be an agreement by Union Minière that the nationalization was the legitimate action of an independent nation, and by the Congo that compensation is a part of any legitimate nationalization. If that should happen, Union Minière could probably be recruited to continue marketing Congolese copper at a healthy profit to itself. If an agreement cannot be reached, the Congo is in for some hard times...
...That there is a vigorous marketplace is obvious, as witness the giant Ford Motor Co.'s unplanned flops (the Edsel) and galloping successes (the Mustang). What is more, any steel, aluminum or copper-industry executive who tried to raise prices this year-and got a jangling phone call from the White House for his trouble-knows that the tale about the government acting like a Victorian spinster is as tall...