Word: wriston
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...Walter Wriston, probably the nation's most influential banker, thinks he has some answers. As chairman of New York's Citicorp, he is a gilt-edged Establishmentarian who gets an insider's rare look at loan-seeking corporations and bends elbows with their chiefs at the Metropolitan Club and the Greenbrier and the Business Roundtable. Yes, says Wriston, business should be strong both in 1978 and 1979, which is as far as anybody can foresee. But he is bedeviled by many questions about modern America, including who killed Jack Armstrong and whether Abe Lincoln could be elected...
History's lesson, as University of Southern California Economist Arthur Laffer has shown in the so-called Laffer Curve, is that when taxes go up, economic activity goes down. Empires from Rome to Britain reached their fullest flower when their taxes were low, Wriston remarks, and started to self-destruct as taxes rose. Americans feel uneasy about their economy, partly because federal, state and local governments tax away 29% of the gross national product. Warns Wriston: "We are getting very close to the point where high taxes will cause the economy to deteriorate...
DIED. Henry Merritt Wriston, 88, president of Brown University (1937-55) and blue-ribbon Government panelist; in Manhattan. At Brown, Wriston established a reputation as an iconoclast, de-emphasizing survey courses and attracting top professors and freeing them of administrative tasks. Describing himself as "a perpetually dissatisfied Republican," Wriston defended academic freedom from assaults by the House Un-American Activities Committee as vigorously as he opposed the New Deal. In 1954 he headed John Foster Dulles' committee for the reorganization of the diplomatic service, and in 1960 he directed the President's Commission on National Goals, an ambitious...
...corporations to acquire the 30 separate parcels involved. So closely was the secret held that when one of the dummy companies set up by the bank's top brass sought a loan to buy a parcel of the block, a lower-level Citibank officer turned it down. Chuckles Wriston: "He didn't know who he was saying...
Citicorp did not announce its plans to build until July 1973. At the time an estimated 30 million sq. ft. of Manhattan office space was standing empty, including 10 million sq. ft. in the World Trade Center, which had opened only three months earlier. Nonetheless, Walter Wriston & Co. remained faithful to their plan to build not merely rentable space but a midtown magnet for people...