Word: ftc
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...industry by proposing a major change in the 24-year-old Clayton Anti-Trust Act. This product of the first trust-busting era made it illegal for one company to purchase the capital stock of another when the result might substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly. FTC claims that the farm-equipment industry is an example of this law's effective evasion through the purchase of competitors' assets rather than stock. FTC therefore recommended to Congress that the Clayton Act be revised so that no company controlling 10% or more of its industry can absorb...
First section of FTC's report on farm equipment went to Congress month ago (TIME, June 13), pointed out that eight companies dominate the field but that two are pre-eminent-International Harvester Co. and Deere & Co. Part II which went to Congress last week pointed out how these companies came to control a large portion of the market by buying up competitors, listed the following factors as "indicating serious monopolistic conditions": 1) dominant position of International Harvester; 2) big advance in farm-equipment prices as compared with other manufactured products; 3) price rigidity in farm equipment during Depression...
International Harvester's President Sydney G. McAllister immediately retorted that his company's case had not been heard, that its high profits in 1937 resulted from the "unusual banked-up volume of sales to customers who had deferred purchases during the Depression," that FTC's analysis of price changes over the years "ignores" many factors, that "if decline in percentage of trade and extraordinary growth in competitors . . . indicates no competition and dominance by the company which has lost the trade, this can only be because of a unique conception of what constitutes competition and dominance. The FTC...
...equal competitive footing all over the U. S. But consumers soon howled. A Chicago buyer in 1920 paid the $40 a ton Pittsburgh price plus $7.60 a ton freight from Pittsburgh, then found that the steel was actually being delivered from a Chicago plant next door. In 1924 FTC got around to jumping on "Pittsburgh Plus." Thereupon the industry developed the basing-point system whereby prices were quoted at some 80 steel-plant centres and a consumer paid the price of the nearest basing-point plus freight...
...Franklin Roosevelt took to grousing about the rigidity of steel prices. The Federal Trade Commission launched an attack on the basing-point system used by the cement industry (TIME, April 25). Then came the Wheeler-Lea Act which had a minor clause making all unchallenged past orders of the FTC automatically effective unless the respondents filed an appeal before May 21. Recalling that FTC's order ending "Pittsburgh Plus" had never been challenged, since the company consented to the action, Big Steel hastened to file an appeal against this 14-year-old cease-&-desist. By this time the handwriting...