Word: leon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
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...
Thus girt with logic, Leon Henderson still had no price weapon last week. There was a strong hint (from Steve Early) that the White House meant to put the whole thing off till next fall. Strategy: by then the cost of living would have gone so high that an angry consumer lobby might be organized to override the Friends of Inflation. But by then also, inflation will be at least a partial fact...
Everybody in Washington expected some inflation last week. To try to freeze and police all U.S. prices now would be a task for a Gestapo, which Washington neither wants nor has the time to put together. Even Leon Henderson, given all the power he wants, expected to be little more than a drag on inflation, stopping advances here & there at strategic points. The problem was seen rather in its overall fiscal aspect: that of increasing total output and keeping consumer buying power down. For the latter, the consumer could count on one thing, whether his prices are controlled...
...relations. For months Rockefeller has told President Roosevelt that the U.S. would have to keep up its exports to Latin America-defense program or no-or take a back seat to the Axis. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles agreed. But OPM's Ed Stettinius and OPACS' Leon Henderson stood pat against any exports that would take materials away from defense or essential civilian needs. Now the Presidential nod has gone to Rockefeller (partly because a Nazi freighter recently slipped through the blockade, delivered an airplane and parts which Brazil's Vasp line needed...