Word: prices
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...CHRYSLER staged a double surprise last week. The company unveiled its new Duster (price: under $2,100), a compact sedan on a Valiant chassis, powered by a 130-h.p. engine. At week's end, Chairman Lynn Townsend disclosed that Chrysler will bring out the smallest of the new U.S. compacts in mid-1971. Called "the 25 Car," it will have a wheelbase of only 91 in., about 3 in. less than that of a Volkswagen. > GENERAL MOTORS has spent more than $100 million building a plant to assemble its entry in the small-car market. Code-named the XP877...
...automakers cannot compete with the imports on the basis of price. Instead they are gambling that potential foreign-car buyers will pay a bit more in original cost and operating expense to gain speed and seating space. Even so, profits on the small cars are going to be slim compared with those on larger models like the Mustang, which are offered with expensive options that can double their price and profitability. If U.S. automakers have miscalculated about the kind of small car American buyers want, they could end up selling cheap cars to customers who otherwise would have bought more...
France, The Netherlands and Denmark have been forced to impose price freezes on nearly every variety of goods and services sold within their borders. All three countries, along with West Germany, Italy, Belgium and Sweden, have recently raised bank interest rates (some of them several times) in an effort to restrain borrowing. Almost everywhere in Europe, factories are humming at or near their capacity, but consumers are spending money so fast that some firms cannot fully meet the demand for their products. French automakers, for example, are making many domestic buyers wait for delivery of new cars because they...
Enforcing the Freeze. France confronts by far the most serious problem. Price increases have been accelerating ever since the costly wage settlements that ended the May-June general strike of 1968. Before the Aug. 8 devaluation of the franc, price increases reached an annual rate of 6.5% v. a July rate of 6% in the U.S. Devaluation will add at least another percentage point to the inflation rate this year by automatically increasing the price of imports...
...price freeze until Sept. 15 that the Pompidou government decreed (TIME, Aug. 22) is proving, as expected, difficult to enforce. The government has only 2,100 inspectors to watch for illegal price increases, which Frenchmen sardonically call la valse des etiquettes (the price-tag waltz). The inspectors must police hundreds of thousands of retail establishments; the number of shoe stores alone is over seven times the total number of inspectors. Of the first 618 stores checked by inspectors in the Paris area, some 150 had raised their prices illegally...