Word: firmness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...uncontrollable international food market, but the numerous, relatively unorganized and competitive farmers also have to buy from and sell to aggregations of vast economic power in the shape of oligopilistic farm machinery companies, food processors, packagers, distributors and retailers. Worse still, all these steps are integrated in one killer firm...
...firm operating in more than one country will not deliberately choose unnecessarily costly locations to build its products. To do so would mean losing profits that could be made by manufacturing products at more efficient locations. In the intensely competitive worldwide market in which GM operates, such a patently inefficient procedure would probably make it impossible for GM to make any overseas sales at all. As you recognize, moreover, multinationals "benefit the U.S. because much of their profit is returned home in the form of retained earnings." In 1977 GM's total international transactions resulted in a net inflow...
...Carter's surprise announcement, Otto Eckstein, head of Data Resources Inc., a computerized forecasting firm, was still not ready to forecast a downturn. His current view: "We now predict recession. At these [interest] rates you are going to drive down housing and construction." Specifically, Eckstein's DRI estimates that there is a 55% chance of recession. Milton Friedman, guru of the conservative monetarist school of economists, gloomily asserts, "We have gone beyond the point of restoring the economy without a recession...
...Angeles Businessman J. Robert Fluor, it seemed a natural way to benefit his two favorite institutions: the University of Southern California, which he serves as chairman of the board of trustees, and the Fluor Corp., an international construction firm he heads that last year did $272 million worth of business in Saudi Arabia alone. Fluor's brainchild was a $22 million research institute at U.S.C. to be called the Middle East Center and funded by American corporations, including his own, with a stake in the Middle East. After all, some 20% of U.S.C.'s enrollment is foreign...
Some Americans agree. Writing in the current Foreign Affairs, two officers of the Boston Consulting Group, a private management study firm, place the blame for the trade imbalance on a lack of aggressiveness among U.S. exporters. They insist that over the past ten years America has steadily lost its share of the Japanese import markets for most manufactured goods and that, whatever the barriers and for whatever reasons, the U.S. has been supplying a smaller and smaller part of what Japan does in fact import...