Word: superboom
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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Decline of Durables. Last summer the optimists hoped for what they called a superboom. The biggest economic riddle of 1961 is why the recovery was not more rambunctious. One obvious reason was that one fear or another-of unemployment in some cases, of international crises in others-prompted Americans to spend far less of their disposable income than in any year since 1958. But searching for deeper causes for the nation's relatively slow rate of economic growth, some economists point to the long-term drop in the demand of durable goods, sales of which are not even growing...
...with auto production rolling at about 6,800,000 cars, steel output running at about no million tons, and housing starts-which are now running 19% above last January's low-likely to rise to 1,400,000 or 1,500,000. This might not be a superboom, or a record breaker, but could make a highly prosperous...
...N.A.B.E. economists were skeptical about the chances for what FORTUNE calls a superboom. There will be no real boom, most of them agreed, until businessmen start spending vigorously on capital expansion-and that is unlikely to happen until the newly tightfisted U.S. consumer (TIME, July 21 et seq.) decides to open his wallet wider. The N.A.B.E.'s outgoing president, Dr. George Cline Smith, senior partner of the Manhattan economic consulting firm of MacKay-Shields Associates, blamed the international news for the consumer's timidity. Said Smith: "If the economy is going to take off for the expected highs...
Japan's businessmen are expanding their plants at an unprecedented rate, largely with imported heavy machinery. And as the benefits of the resulting superboom trickle down, Japan's consumers have gone on an epic spending spree, snapping up in ever increasing quantities everything from electric rice cookers to autos. In response, many Japanese manufacturers who used to produce for export are now producing for the domestic market...
...boom,' " said U.C.L.A. Economist Robert Williams last week. But for all his semantic fastidiousness, Dr. Williams-like many another forecaster-could find no better term to describe what the U.S. economy seems headed for. The real optimists had an even more hyperbolic word to describe what is coming: Superboom. By next spring, they predict, Berlin-inspired defense orders will strain U.S. productive capacity, and by Christmas 1962, the gross national product will soar to nearly $600 billion...