Word: lumbers
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Anxious to escape abrasive confrontations of the kind that embroiled his two immediate predecessors, Richard Nixon had hoped to avoid direct federal intervention against price increases by private industry. Yet last week the President took strong steps to arrest soaring lumber prices-and there was little grumbling. His tactics much resembled those of the Johnson Administration, which in 1965 fought off aluminum and copper price rises by threatening to release supplies of the metals from Government stockpiles. Nixon ordered the Interior and Agriculture departments to step up the sale of lumber from publicly owned forests, which contain more than half...
Wood prices have been highly volatile during the past year. The cost of plywood has risen by 77%. Douglas fir lumber, used mostly in housing, has doubled in price in many localities. Housing's surprising winter strength has only heightened the price pressure. Last week the Commerce Department reported that new housing starts reached an annual rate of 1,700,000 in February, well above last year's total...
Limiting Exports. Builders blame the price problem not only on heavy domestic demand, but on rising exports to Japan, whose timber purchases in the U.S. have increased twentyfold since 1960. Last year the Japanese bought enough lumber to erect 40% of the U.S. output of one-family homes. In response to complaints that numerous small lumber mills as well as price stability have been imperiled, Congress last fall sharply limited exports of lumber harvested from federal forests. But prices have continued to rise, partly because of severe winter weather in the Pacific Northwest and the recent East Coast longshoremen...
...stratofreighters, wheezing into readiness. Trucks dash up, hauling crates of food and medicines. Eventually, crews as varied as their airplanes - Swedes, Finns, Americans, a stolid Yorkshireman, a not so dour Scot - screech up in cars and climb aboard. One by one, at 20-minute intervals, the cargo planes lumber down the runway, turn northward toward the Nigerian coast. Late afternoon sunlight splashes on little blue and gold fish, the fuselage emblems of the interfaith airlift organized by the World Council of Churches and the Catholic relief organization Caritas to shuttle food to starving Biafra...
...Japan to impose "voluntary" quotas on steel exports, and Nixon has made clear that he favors similar quotas for textiles. Another threat to free trade comes from home builders and lumbermen, who want the U.S. to curb timber exports to Japan. Partly because of high Japanese demand for U.S. lumber, domestic prices have risen by nearly 100% in the past year, increasing the average cost of a new house...