Word: prices
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Each weekday morning Louis St. Laurent was up at 8:30. After breakfast, Chauffeur Franços Dion, who has been with the family 26 years, drove him to his old law office in the Price Building, where his two lawyer sons carry on the family practice. He chatted with them about their cases, talked with the local politicians who dropped in, kept in touch with Ottawa by phone. He turned aside political questions. When a reporter asked him if he thought that he would be reelected, he cracked: "I think people are tired of extraordinary men and of extraordinary...
...nation to do so, adjust itself to a boom which had changed its character. It was no longer chiefly based on scarcities and stored-up war demand, but on full employment, and replacement demand, shored up by enormous federal spending. Businessmen would have to cut their prices to a new pattern of shrinking markets in many lines; labor would have to recognize that decreasing employment would bring a sort of buyers' market there also. It might have to reconsider "fourth round" wage demands in the light of benefits from a drop in the cost of living. By reasonableness...
...Turn. With its boom, the U.S. had high prices. Yet the notable event of the year was not that prices had scooted up to the highest peak of the postwar boom-as they had in midsummer-but that by autumn they had started to come down. U.S. businessmen who had been preaching to the world that production-and not rationing and controls-was the cure for inflation had finally shown the preaching to have the ring of economic gospel. The buyers' market swept in with old-fashioned price-cutting competition...
...year's end, prices of electrical appliances (refrigerators, irons, washing machines, etc.) were down 25% from their peak; cotton cloth was down again to OPA levels and below. Some prices were still rising (autos, metals, etc.), but the "cost-of-living" items (food, clothing, furniture, etc.) were coming down. A drop in retail sales had scared department stores into a rash of pre-Christmas price cutting. Even then, stores barely managed to sell as much...
Many an auto buyer, cold-shouldered by dealers in May when a "new used" Chevrolet sedan went for $2,260 ($984 above the list price), found that he was loved in December. Lincolns, Kaisers, Frazers and Hudsons could be bought right off dealers' floors. So could trucks and farm equipment, once as short as Chevvies. After a long climb, employment and production in some industries were both dropping "unseasonally" at year's end. Though employment, at 60.1 million, was almost one million above the end of 1947, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' cost-of-living index, which...