Word: lumbers
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...megabuck borrowers include some of the most troubled credit risks in all of corporate America, Among the loans: $140 million to International Harvester, the deeply troubled Chicago farm-equipment manufacturer; $16 million to bankrupt Braniff Airways of Dallas; $57 million to Wickes Companies, Inc., a now bankrupt seller of lumber and furniture; $200 million to subsidiaries of Dome Petroleum, the struggling Canadian oil firm; and $80 million to American Invsco, a wavering condominium developer...
...staggering cost of borrowing money at today's rates can wreck the business plan of even the shrewdest corporation. In 1980 Wickes Corp., a $2 billion San Diego lumber and furniture seller, bought Gamble-Skogmo, a struggling Minneapolis-based retailer, in an attempt to ease its dependence on the highly cyclical housing industry. Wickes executives were enthusiastic at the time, even though the deal doubled the company's debt load to nearly $2 billion. After both the housing and the retailing businesses unexpectedly went into a simultaneous slump last year, Wickes ran up huge losses that could exceed...
...Francisco's Michael Moritz traveled to Oregon, where the lumber industry is hard hit, and discovered that fear pervaded not only those waiting in unemployment-office lines but even the clerks on the other side of the benefits counter. "There is a growing feeling that this can happen to anybody," he says. Chicago's Steven Holmes found one pervasive factor, a creeping uncertainty, which plagued his subjects and complicated his interviews. One unemployed executive told him: "I could handle this a lot better if I knew I would have a job in two months, or six months...
...about G.O.P. fortunes in the fall, it is not clear that Reagan will suffer much politically. Interviewing the jobless across the nation last week, TIME correspondents found relatively few who blamed the President for their plight. Rudy Barker, 62, was laid off in 1980 from his job at a lumber mill in Willamina, Ore., and he has not worked since then. "All this started before Reagan," he says. "It's been coming on for the last two or three Presidents." Says Samuel Ehrenhalt, Middle Atlantic regional commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "A lot of people are just...
...WEST. The region is an economic patchwork quilt. Wyoming has an unemployment rate below 5%, California copes with 8.6%, and Oregon and Washington are suffering badly. Because the lumber trade has been crippled by construction woes, Oregon has an unemployment rate of 11.4%; Washington has 11.1%. By the middle of last month, 19,000 of the region's 102,000 sawmill employees had been laid off, while another 41,000 were working curtailed shifts. "It's like Chinese water torture," says John Hampton, chairman of Hampton Affiliates, a Portland-based logging company. "There's been no relief...