Word: hendersons
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...Leon Henderson was helpless. Most cotton mills last week were ignoring the retroactive feature of OPACS' price ceilings on gray goods, were billing at the old higher prices. Some furniture makers were still defiant of "jawbone" price control, as Chrysler had been (TIME, July 7). The price of cotton rose 3/4? to 15.21? a pound, a new eleven-year peak. Commodity price indexes paused on their upward flight, but briefly. Montgomery Ward's big fall & winter catalogue came out with 70% of the items showing higher prices than last spring, and a hedge clause on all prices...
Most conspicuous eligibles were the farmers and their Washington representatives: men like the Farm Bureau's lobbyist Ed O'Neal, whose hefty shoulder was behind the Fulmer (85%-of-parity) Act; like "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina, who has already tangled with Henderson; like Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, who combines a farm constituency with a weakness for greenback schemes. Such men were already talking opposition to any price control until farm prices reach 100% of parity, or even more. But since parity is a variable figure (related to a cost-of-living index) and since higher...
...been based on the expectation rather than the reality of higher living costs. Most wage increases to date have been readily absorbed by falling unit costs on greater volume, thus not directly forcing price rises (though helping to keep prices up). But the limit of that absorptive capacity, admitted Henderson last fortnight, has now been reached "in industries operating at capacity levels...
...third group was made up of the weaker, just-one-more side of almost every U.S. businessman. Henderson regards this as the strongest factor influencing price rises. Although all sane businessmen fear inflation, none regards "a leetle bitsy price rise in his own industry" as responsible for it. To businessmen in certain long-depressed industries, higher prices seem simple justice, reviving dreams of some pre-1929 parity of their own. Example: real estate (whose owners would emerge mortgage-free from any real inflation...
Some people, moreover, regard price rises as not only good business but good economics. Cornell's Professor Frank A. Pearson believes that free prices are the safest means of adjusting supply to demand even in a war economy. Last fortnight, in the Harvard Business Review, Leon Henderson and OPM Purchasing Chief Donald Nelson, in a joint article expounding Government price philosophy ("the results of our thinking thus far"), agreed that free prices were still the best medicine for some defense problems. Example: mercury, where a doubling of price has doubled production, and zinc, where a 60% price increase reopened...