Word: downturn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first nine months of this year, overall retail sales are only 4% above their 1968 pace-less than the rate of price increases. Even in Southern California, where department-store sales are generally up, one discount-store manager, Paul Hulse of Redondo Beach's Hartfield-Zodys, detects a downturn in sales of color televisions, luxury refrigerators and stoves. To meet the competition of discount stores, Sears, Roebuck has opened some 175 of its 825 stores for business on Sunday. Retailers-and automakers-can take heart from a historical pattern detected in a University of Michigan study. Over the past...
...raise prices saw his earnings drop. The consumer who borrowed for a spending spree is paying off his debt in cheapened dollars; the consumer who saved instead is holding dollars that have depreciated. Today most economists believe that inflationary expectations can be conquered by a mild downturn in business. At a time of no growth, they argue, businessmen who hiked prices would lose markets. Complaints from customers annoyed by past increases last week caused Bethlehem Steel and Armco Steel to cut prices on some important products...
Surviving a Slowdown. Burns has suggested that a recession might not be so bad. He has often said that the U.S. can survive a business slowdown, or even downturn, without necessarily incurring a sharp increase in unemployment. He reasons that the economy has become service-oriented, and that service workers are less likely to be laid off than those in manufacturing. Even in manufacturing, he thinks, shortages of skilled labor have been so severe that companies will continue to hoard workers rather than fire them as sales and profits decline...
Capital Change. Despite all this, however, there are other signals that show a downturn in the overall economy. Retail sales leveled off months ago, and auto sales have turned sluggish. New orders for durable goods declined 3% in June. For the first time in eleven months, manufacturers were filling old orders faster than new business was coming in. So far in 1969, the gross national product has risen at a real annual rate of only 2.4%, compared with the 6% increase of 1968's first half. The real growth of the nation's economy has moved down...
...Federal Reserve Board, which has been desperately looking for evidence that its restrictive money policy has produced some slowdown. But New York's First National City Bank warned in its latest economic letter that, "to hold fast to a restrictive policy until the signs of an economic downturn are unmistakable means that the policy will have gone too far." Reason: economic indicators do not clearly signal a recession until after it has begun...