Word: graysons
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Speaking to a meeting of AFL-CIO price monitors in Washington last week, Price Commission Chairman C. Jackson Grayson made a startling admission: it is impossible for ordinary consumers to know whether increases on the products they buy are legal or not. Indeed, added a top official of the Internal Revenue Service, the widely displayed invitations for customers to inspect "base price lists" are "largely psychological." Customers who take the trouble to pore through a store's all-but-unintelligible price lists still have no way of knowing whether any single price increase conforms to Phase II guidelines...
Worn Welcome. Meanwhile, one of the fonder dreams of C. Jackson Grayson, chairman of the Price Commission, was realized with stunning speed. When he announced a 21% yardstick for price increases in November, Grayson said that he hoped that some prices would go down while others went up. Last week, after several days of unpublicized price fighting in the steel industry, U.S. Steel Corp. announced that it will reduce prices $5 to $25 a ton on several major products, including some that the company had been given permission by the Price Commission to increase. As a result, the price hike...
...order to pass on any large increase in steel prices to their customers. For General Motors, such an application would have been the third one for a price hike since Phase II began; for Ford and Chrysler, the second. None are anxious to wear out their welcome on Grayson's doorstep, and they thus began demanding relief from their suppliers...
...Price Commission contrasts with the confusion rending its sister agency, the Pay Board. The board established a 5.5% guideline for wage raises, but got in the hole very quickly by approving a coal contract that calls for increases of 15% or more the first year. In his boldest move, Grayson acted to contain the inflationary impact of that ruling. When coal companies asked for price rises ranging from 5.4% to 9.4%, the Price Commission allowed only 2.9% to 4.9%. Grayson also announced a general principle that companies can raise prices only as much as they would if wage increases really...
That decision frightened some businessmen, who fear that they will be caught in a choking profit squeeze. Grayson discloses that two Nixon Administration officials telephoned to voice "concern over the ramifications of the commission's decision." but he stood his ground. As he told TIME Correspondent Lawrence Malkin: "I will listen to the Administration if someone calls up and says that the policy is not what they would like. But we will decide...