Word: wriston
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WALTER B. WRISTON, chairman of the First National City Bank of New York City...
...WRISTON: Another thing is that they have complete exchange control, and the yen is not free. You can sell it for dollars or buy it for dollars only under limited circumstances. So a free market has never set an exchange rate for the yen. I think that is ridiculous. Until they have convertible currency, we will never know what their real trading power is. Everybody says the yen is strong. Let it go out into the world market to compete, and then we will find...
...WRISTON: We have a Treaty of Commerce and Friendship with Japan, and it requires reciprocity of investment and trade. No one has ever leaned on them to really observe that. Japan also signed Article VIII of the International Monetary Fund,* yet their currency is not convertible. Nobody has leaned on them for that either, so far as I know...
...WRISTON: I have just been over to Europe, and I got this curve ball thrown into every conversation. They would say: "Why don't we join hands against Japan?" I would say: "You have textile quotas against Japan; why don't we join hands and lower those, too?" And they would say: "You don't understand the problem...
...WRISTON: I am not sure that we should throw away the benefits of free trade because at the moment we haven't found the levers of power to pull to compete against Japan. To remedy our present problem, we will have to examine many things: our antitrust policy, our policy of excluding unions from antitrust legislation, our tradition of the natural antipathy of business and Government. The way to fix our problem is not through an escalating trade war but through opening up markets of the world to more goods. Protectionism is a losing game any way you play...