Word: demand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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During the recession, TIME'S economists expect, the real gross national product will decline by only 1% or 2% before recovering next spring. Still, that will be enough to weaken loan demand and cause overall interest rates to turn down. The economists expect the banks' prime lending rate to rise from the present 11¾% to 12½% or 13% in early summer, and then decline, perhaps sharply. Thus, the stock market should rise later this year. Wall Street rallies often begin during recessions...
These people are major users of credit, taking out mortgages to acquire their bigger houses and urban condominiums and installment loans to furnish them. Maurice Mann, vice chairman of A.G. Becker, a brokerage firm, has warned savings and loan officials to anticipate "massive demand" for mortgage lending in the 1980s "as a result of the postwar babies seeking shelter." Insurance executives are looking at the group as an ever expanding market for homeowners' and life policies. Bankers are catering to their desire for convenience by opening more and more centers that can manage all aspects of a customer...
...American medicine, government and insurance payments have removed all effective limits on demand, and thus price. Though sellers' markets always tend to rapid inflation, they usually are subject to at least one rough check: prices cannot rise so high that the buyers simply become unable to pay. That used to be true of medicine, too, in the now dimly remembered days when patients paid nearly all the bills out of their own pockets. No more: the saddest irony of the medical inflation is that it has been triggered largely by an effort to bring quality medical care within everyone...
...more than $3,500 this year for a typical family of four). But the system could hardly have been better designed to fan inflation than if that had been its purpose. It has in effect repealed for medicine the last vestiges of the law of supply and demand, a free market equivalent of the law of gravity, and made health care a market of weightlessness: what goes up keeps going...
Patients now are asked to produce their insurance or Medicare cards before they state their symptoms; once satisfied that they are covered, they rarely even ask what the treatment will cost. Thus demand expands no matter what happens to the national income. Increases in supply do not hold down costs, as they would in a conventional market, quite the opposite. Hospitals build more beds than there are patients available to occupy them: some 25% of the more than 1 million hospital beds in the U.S. are unused