Word: spurted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...automen say that the key to recovery is a rise in confidence among consumers that it is safe to go into debt to buy a new car. The carmakers have thus been troubled by the recent spurt in interest rates and a midsummer dip in polls measuring consumer confidence. But many Wall Street analysts believe that American motorists cannot sit on their wallets much longer. By some estimates, nervous consumers have put off buying 4 million cars over the past two years, creating a reservoir of demand that Detroit could well begin to tap with its 1976 models...
...officials reassuringly predicted that the retail cost of food will rise no more for the rest of the year than it did in July alone. Their reasoning: most meat and poultry prices appear to have peaked, and some have already declined at the wholesale level. In addition, the July spurt resulted partly from bad weather that hurt grain and vegetable crops. During all of 1975, the department forecasts, food prices will rise 9%; that is more than its previous prediction of 6% to 8%, but would still indicate that most of the rise is over...
...contains many potential pitfalls, which were all too evident last week. President Ford finally produced a plan for gradual decontrol of oil prices that has a chance of passing Congress, but some threat remains of an abrupt jolt to the economy when present controls expire Aug. 31. A June spurt in consumer prices indicated that inflation is not yet dead, and a renewed rise in interest rates stirred fear among some economists that the Federal Reserve Board is not pursuing policies expansive enough to promote an accelerating recovery. Details...
Administration reaction to the spurt was mixed. Treasury Secretary William Simon, an inveterate Cassandra, warned that "inflationary pressures remain a serious and continuing problem." White House Economic Adviser Alan Greenspan more optimistically told the Congressional Joint Economic Committee that the June rise does not foreshadow "a new burst of inflation," but conceded that it does mean the U.S. will have to settle for a "base rate of inflation" higher than 3% to 4%. One reason that price boosts may not continue at the June pace: meat prices have leveled off in recent weeks as larger supplies of beef have begun...
There are still soft spots in the recovery. Housing starts, after a spurt in May, slumped back in June to a moribund pace of little more than a million a year. Corporate spending on new plant and equipment remains low, and the unemployment rate is still a worrisome 8.6%. Interest rates, whose recent declines had helped lift the economy, have begun to rise again...