Word: ftc
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Businessmen were pleased-and surprised-that Joe O'Mahoney, an old trustbuster and friend of the Federal Trade Commission, wanted to permit freight absorption, a mainstay of the basing point system. But O'Mahoney said that the bill would only put into law what FTC has been saying ever since the Supreme Court decision, namely, that any manufacturer could absorb freight charges to meet a competitor's prices at distant points so long as there was no conspiracy to fix prices. What FTC had objected to was collusive freight absorption. Much of the confusion, he thought...
...FTC said it was not concerned with pricing methods, but only with possible conspiracies to fix prices. Individual businessmen, it said, are free to compute their prices by using basing points, absorbing freight charges, or any other way they please, provided they do not use the system to conspire to fix prices illegally...
...FTC also sounded a warning that any use of the basing-point system was likely to arouse its suspicions. FTC said it would suspect conspiracy whenever: 1) prices quoted by competing firms stayed uniform over any length of time, or were changed in concert; 2) competitors whose prices were unusually low were squeezed out or "disciplined" some other way; 3) companies habitually accepted a drop in sales rather than cut their prices...
...short, when FTC last year was plumping for f.o.b. pricing, it was not trying to lay down a law; it was merely pointing out the safest way to avoid suspicion. But, warned FTC: "No pricing formula ... is automatically free from or . . . subject to a charge of conspiracy...
...Under FTC's rotation system, Mason is due to become FTC chairman next January (for one year) but privately he fears that the other members* will stop rotating if he does not shut up. Nevertheless, this week Mason kept on talking. "Down in my shop," he told the Boston Conference on Distribution, "it seems as though business is a pretty bad thing." Then he recited another jingle...