Word: shrewdly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...C.I.O.'s ninth annual convention in Boston last week, which a lot of delegates expected to be a Donnybrook Fair between the left and the right, turned out to be more like a day at Sunnybrook Farm. Shrewd Phil Murray had it firmly under control...
That was the beginning of the famed Comstock Lode, but it was 15 years before it really paid off-when it became the royal domain of four shrewd Irishmen. In just one year (1874) each became a multimillionaire. Oscar Lewis, annalist of San Francisco and author of a good book (The Big Four) on the builders of the Central Pacific, has written a thoughtful history of the men who exploited Corn-stock's richest ore. He makes it clear that the West as a whole gained nothing from this strike but a prolonged fever and a legend...
Piratical Past. The founders of these families were almost invariably shrewd 19th Century merchants who bought cheap and sold dear: "... a Cabot, a Derby, a Sears, an Endicott, a Peabody, a Crowninshield and many others. All represent First Family names today and yet all were men who, if not actually pirates, were at least vikings in their methods." If some were above the slave trade, "they were not averse to an occasional sally into the opium trade." Merchant T. Jefferson Coolidge confided to his "Day Book" that "money was the only 'real avenue' to social success in Boston...
...advisers had urged their clients five months ago to "buy Kaiser-Frazer stock and double your money," he would have been hooted at. On the New York Curb Exchange, where the stock steadily dropped from its $20.25 offering price to a low of 5 last May, it was considered shrewd to be "short" on Kaiser-Frazer, i.e., to bet it would go lower...
Sweet Tooth. The villain seemed indeed to be the British Government, which through its British Cocoa Control Board last year sold some 300,000 tons, about half the world output. It sets the pace for similar Government agencies in Brazil and the Dominican Republic. All three, by dint of shrewd timing in deliveries, have made fat profits in the U.S. market. But the British were not wholly responsible for the price rise...