Word: steels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...basic industries; now it will be surrendering a large chunk of perhaps the most profitable investment any British government has ever made. FORTUNE ranks BP fifth among the seven international oil companies?the so-called Seven Sisters ?with sales in 1975 of $17 billion. From London, Chairman David Steel, an affable Oxford-educated lawyer who is a tough negotiator, oversees a global empire. It embraces more than 650 production, refining and marketing subsidiaries in Europe, the Middle East and the U.S. (where BP has a production partnership with Standard Oil of Ohio for Alaska's North Slope...
...British industry. The relative success of BP also dramatizes the value of letting proficient managers alone. Any attention focused on BP inevitably brings to mind the contrasting inefficiency of businesses controlled by the government in fact as well as name, such as the National Coal Board and the British Steel Corp...
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates, a 6% increase in steel-mill products drives up the Wholesale Price Index in the following month by only one-tenth of a percentage point. Otto Eckstein, a member of TIME's Board of Economists, believes increases in the wages of public employees, energy prices, "maybe even the Russian wheat sale" are more inflationary than steel boosts...
Symbolically, however, the importance of steel prices has, if anything, been swollen by decades of publicity. Steel still goes into an extraordinarily broad variety of products; makers of goods ranging from autos to toasters may seize on steel boosts, justifiably or not, as an excuse to raise their own prices. And makers of many other basic materials tend to watch how politicians react to steel increases as a clue to what price hikes they themselves may get away with...
Responding to continuing cries from the West, the Japanese were already taking some steps to reduce their trade surplus before the latest dustup. For instance, in 1977 as in '76, Tokyo will limit steel exports to the Community to 1.4 million tons. But at Common Market headquarters in Brussels, these steps have been viewed as too little, too late. In November, over lunch in Brussels, European Commissioner Finn Olav Gundelach warned Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister Bunroku Yoshino that Japan would have to submit a comprehensive plan to right the trade imbalance or face retaliation. The Europeans, for example, could...