IN the economic year of 1954 the world had a clear and easily understandable measure of the soaring strength of the U.S. That measure was the great bull market in stocks. Stock prices rose higher than in 1929, and on the last day of the year the Dow-Jones industrial average hit an alltime high of 404.39. But what gave the bull market historic significance was that it symbolized the strongest possible confidence in the capitalistic system, a confidence that had often seemed lacking, even among U.S. capitalists themselves, in previous years of the boom. The remarkable fact about this surging confidence was that it began to grow at a time when business was slipping. Such doomsayers as British Economist Colin Clark predicted that the U.S. was in for a major depression, and right up until the November election Democrats cried economic havoc. But few really believed them. As industrial production edged down, the market went up—and as it turned out, the market was right.
For in 1954’s “recession” the U.S. racked up its second-best business year in history, and the best peacetime year ever.
The bull stood for something more than Americans’ faith in their economy. As the U.S. entered a new era of competitive coexistence with the Communist world, the bull was a symbol that Americans were sure they could compete—and win.
The fact was that the 1954 bull was a different breed from any other that had gone before. From almost every angle he seemed made of muscle. He stood against the background of an entirely new economy made up of many industries that did not even exist in 1929, and with a gross national product more than three times as big. Corporate profits, helped by the death of the excess-profits tax, totaled $17 billion in 1954, down 6% from 1953, but 100% above the 1929 level. On top of that, Americans in 1954 proved they knew how their giant economy worked and how it could be kept at work efficiently.
That knowledge and confidence sent stock prices soaring all through the year. Spectacular gains were scored throughout the list, e.g., General Motors went from 60 to 98;* Jersey Standard from 72 to 111; RCA from 23 to 38; Du Pont from 107 to 167; Anaconda from 30 to 52. As a group, the biggest rise (an average of 165%) came in the order-laden aircraft stocks. Taking into account splits, Douglas started at 83, rose 177 points (it gained 34 points in the last two weeks alone); Boeing started at 49 and rose 99 points; Northrop started at 18, gained 57 points. But it was not merely a war market.
Office-equipment stocks, buoyed up by the promise of a new thinking-machine age, jumped 78%; the busy airlines gained 95%; the oils rose 45%. In their scramble to buy, investors were not merely purchasing present profits; they were betting on the future. Example: though the steel industry limped through the year at less than 75% of capacity, investors in steel stocks pushed U.S. Steel up 34 points, to 74, and more than doubled the price of Bethlehem, to 109.
New Routes. As prices scooted higher, the public started coming into the market. In other days this would have been a sure sign for Wall Street’s professionals to get out. But this was a new kind of public with new ways of getting in. It was also part of a new trend away from the philosophy of security at any price; having seen what the American economy could do—and how it had confounded the doomsayers—Americans were deciding that it was high time to invest in America’s future.
Mutual funds provided a route for small investors to put some $375 million into the market, and Wall Street did a good job of paving other investment roads. The New York Stock Exchange borrowed a page from the retailers’ book; it started an installment-buying program that persuaded 26,000 new investors to put $63 million into buying stocks. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, the largest U.S. brokerage house, fitted out three trailers as traveling branch offices, sent them touring the New York, Boston and Chicago areas, signed up hundreds of new accounts.
In 1929 brokers’ board rooms were crowded with tape-watchers and tipsters who bought stocks without even knowing what a company manufactured. In 1954 the only time board rooms were crowded was at night—for classes in which new investors learned how to buy stocks and how to evaluate a company. “When we started talking stock to a lot of our new customers out west Texas way,” said a Dallas broker, “it took a while to make it clear that we didn’t mean the four-legged kind.” Dozens of corporations helped educate the public about free enterprise by starting stock-purchase plans under which employees could use part of their wages to buy shares in the companies for which they worked. And the lessons took. Said Chief Petty Officer Edward J. Michaels, a new investor in Dallas: “I watched American business growing and growing, and I got a feeling I wanted to grow with it.” One of the phenomena of 1954 was the huge growth of invest ment clubs, whose members put in $10 or $20 a month for group investment. In Denver a group of 27 men and women —ranging from housewives to the owner of a tungsten mine —bought solid stocks including such blue chips as Union Carbide (up 12 points, to 86) and Consolidated Edison (up 5 points, to 46). In eleven months they made $1,500, or 12% on their in vestment.
While most of the new investors were buying blue chips for the long pull, there were a number who dreamed of quick killings. The most speculative flyers were taken in the uranium stocks. In Salt Lake City, where new uranium companies were springing up at the rate of one every three days, snack bars featured “uraniumburgers” instead of hamburgers. As it turned out, there was as much uranium in the meat as in the claims on which many of the uranium stocks had been floated. Many of the penny uranium stocks went into a slump. But few speculators were discouraged. Everyone still hoped to make a killing on the uranium-rich Colorado Plateau, where 650 new mines were opened during the year.
Theories for All. As the market reached an alltime high, there were inevitable uneasy looks back to 1929. Were 1954’s stock prices as vulnerable as they were then? Where would they go from here? In their endless search for new ways to predict the market will do, Wall Streeters have developed theories to suit every whim. They range from the conservative old Dow Theory— so conservative that anyone who followed it since end would have missed most major market turns by — to attempts at guessing the market by studying the of the moss on trees, the number of lemmings, receipts in Milwaukee and the activity of sunspots.
But in 1954 the theories ran into trouble. Some of the reasons listed by 83-year-old Irwin Vick Shannon, once a dean the sunspotters : “Cheap money, huge governmental spending and enormous building activity have largely offset the usual [bearish] effects of low sunspot activity.” Nobody thought that stock prices would go up forever. In fact, Wall Streeters were looking for a good-sized “technical” reaction—simply because the market had gone up so fast with hardly a breather. But no one thought that it had reached its peak. Just as Americans had become accustomed to;—an evergrowing economy, there was no reason why stock prices, which lagged for so many years, should not finally get in step with the growth of the economy.
On the average, stocks were still priced at only 13 times earnings v. 21 times earnings in 1929. At 4.35%, stock yields were still better than those of high-grade bonds (2.89%), whereas in 1929 the comparison favored bonds. Dozens of stocks, e.g., American Distilling and J. I. Case, could be bought for less than 50% of their actual assets per share; scores, including such solid citizens as American Machine and Foundry and Merck, were far below their postwar highs. Though speculation was rising, it was hardly out of hand. Credit in the market, where 50% had to be put up in cash for stock purchases, totaled only $1.7 billion v.
$8.5 billion in 1929, when as little as 5% had to be paid down in cash. High taxes were another bolster under the market.
They discouraged investors from taking their big paper profits (an estimated 50% of all G.M. stock was bought at around 40).
Aside from the surging public confidence, the greatest force for stock-market stability was the confidence of the big professional investors—the huge pension funds, insurance companies and mutual funds. Out of the $148 billion worth of shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange, an estimated 46% had already been tucked away by the funds and insurance companies, and more were being sopped up every day. Pension funds were growing at the rate of $2 billion a year, and about $400 million of that was being invested in common stocks. Mutual funds were growing almost as fast. While the institutions helped push prices up by removing big blocks of stock from the market, they also served as stabilizers in minor market declines.
Most of them buy on a “dollar averaging” plan, i.e., at regular intervals, they invest the same amount of cash in a stock. Thus, when the market goes down, the funds are able to buy more shares with the same amount of cash.
Some Wall Streeters worried about what would happen if the funds should start unloading. But they could not do that without breaking the market for their own holdings, nor were they in any mood to do so. They bought for the long term, well aware that an investor who had bought stocks even at the 1929 peak—and held on through depression and wars—would by now have had a 37% profit in General Electric, an 87% profit in Sears, Roebuck, an 800% profit in Dow Chemical. As one Wall Streeter said, “The big boys aren’t looking at the Dow-Jones.
They’re looking at the industry.” Hard Selling. What the big boys saw in industry in 1954 was a record of solid accomplishment. There were some scattered cases of acute unemployment, but at worst, the total number of jobless never topped 3,700,000 v. more than 4,000,000 in the mild recession of 1949, when the work force was smaller.
Though total output of goods and services was down by 2½% to $356 billion, it was still a full 38% above the 1949 level. The Federal Reserve Board’s index of production dropped a maximum of 10%, but at year’s end it was heading up again, and was already above the corresponding level of 1953. Despite the slight dip, industry spent $26.7 billion on expansion, only 6% less than in 1953. And Americans were able to make more money after taxes ($253 billion) and spend more ($233 billion) than ever before. Among their purchases: 5,300,000 cars, 3,400,000 refrigerators, 6,400,000 radios. While overall appliance sales were down slightly (to $6.9 billion), 1954 was a near-record year for TV sets (7,000,000) and washing machines (3,650,000), and a record year for air conditioners (1,230,000). Their sales were all bolstered by the second-best housing year on record (1,200,000 houses v. 1,100,000 in 1953 and 1,400,000 in record 1950).
But selling was hard, for in 1954 consumers gave businessmen a taste of what competitive coexistence can mean at home. Department stores, once a major market place for appliances, saw some 35% of that business go to discount houses as bargain hunters stalked the land. Competition was so stiff in the auto industry that sales increases were racked up only by G.M. and Ford. Chrysler’s cut of the market slumped from 20% to 13%, and mergers cut the number of auto companies from eight to six. But by year’s end, Chrysler was scoring a comeback with its new models and all auto companies were producing in high gear. And Ford, in a frantic attempt to knock Chevvie out of first place in the industry, turned out a new car every four seconds.
Throughout industry competition brought more mergers (some 800) than in any other year since 1929. Battling to keep old markets, manufacturers cut costs and stretched production facilities. Scrambling for new markets, they turned out mountains of new products, ranging from Boeing’s 707, America’s first jet transport, to a jet-age, one-minute oatmeal for those who could no longer be bothered with the oldfashioned, two-minute kind.
In 1954 management found that it either had to produce the goods—or be thrown out. The proxy fight of the year gave scrappy Bob Young control of the New York Central. Within seven months he also had a fat paper profit of about $4,000,000 on his personal and company stock holdings, after a 10-point rise in Central stock when prospects for the road brightened.
Caution & Hope. As the year began, every businessman knew that the dip in business towards the end of 1953 had raised a great question for 1954: How well could the Administration, with its growing set of economic tools, help industry to combat the drop? The test came at a crucial time for an Administration determined to balance the budget and get government out of business. With the Korean war ended, huge cuts in defense spending were due. Farm income had been falling for two years, and the Administration intended to dump the rigid-support prices that had lessened the slide but had also created history’s most gigantic pile of food surpluses. On top of that, after years of peak production, many an economist was sure that the U.S.
would have to slow down its output of autos, houses, appliances and other consumer goods. In their caution businessmen were cutting inventories at the rate of $4 billion a year, and consumers were watching their pennies.
But as the year progressed, the Government skillfully used its economic tools, one by one, to turn the tide. Defense spending, as expected, dropped by $8 billion, to a rate of $44 billion a year. But the Administration countered the drop with tax cuts that amounted to $7.4 billion. Said Treasury Secretary George Humphrey: “Some people have called this a recession.
It is really a transition during which the billions of dollars worth of spending by the Government is transferred to spending by millions of private individuals.” As income from salaries and wages dropped by $2 billion, the take-home pay remained almost the same because of outright tax cuts and a drop in personal income-tax payments as the progressive tax structure worked in reverse. Similarly, while corporate earnings before taxes dropped at an annual rate of $5 billion, declining income-tax payments and the death of the excess-profits tax cut corporate taxes by almost the same amount.
New Tools at Work. As the jobless totals rose, other fiscal tools were brought into action. Not only did $2 billion in unemployment-insurance payments help fill the gap in wages, but there was a step-up of $700 million in Social Security payments. The Federal Reserve Board eased credit by cutting bank-reserve requirements and the discount rate at which banks borrow from the Federal Reserve. The Administration also wisely abandoned, at least temporarily, its determination to balance the budget, prepared to accept a $4.7 billion deficit in the current fiscal year. With its new housing law, which cut down-payment requirements and liberalized Government mortgage insurance, the Government gave a fillip to the housing industry.
Such policies helped check the slide and start business up again. The biggest boom was in the building industry. Total construction hit a new high of $37 billion, up 6% from 1953, without counting the great do-it-yourself boom, which had grown from a hobby into a $6 billion industry.
When the U.S. sneezes, according to an old economic adage, the world catches pneumonia. But that was in the days when the U.S. economy was operating on such a narrow margin that even a slight downward dip would dry up imports and thus help depress business everywhere. In 1937-38, for example, industrial production dropped 21% and imports dropped 36%. But in 1954—to the delight of the free world and the consternation of Communists everywhere—the U.S. in a recession still proved to be so strong that its case of sniffles hardly affected world trade.
Imports, at $10.1 billion, fell no more than industrial production. Furthermore, foreign nations, many of them rebuilt with the help of U.S. dollars and machines, were strong enough to keep buying from the U.S. at the rate of $14 billion a year, thus helped the U.S. get over its sniffles.
As the November elections firmly established the voter’s middle-of-the-road approach—and the fact that both parties had staked their futures on an expanding economy—more confidence spilled into the stock market, sent prices up 14% in eight weeks. By year’s end, consumers who had once held back in fear of recession were purchasing goods as eagerly as investors were buying stocks. Christmas shopping hit a new peak, and retail sales for the year surged to some $14 billion, the same as in record-breaking 1953.
Growth in 3-D. All through the U.S. the new confidence was reflected by the changing industrial landscape. In the east, many new plants sprang up in the Delaware Valley region.
There, U.S. Steel’s Fairless Works passed a notable milestone: the first ore from the company’s Cerro Bolivar deposit in Venezuela began to flow to the plant. The Williston Basin had its first large oil refinery at Mandan, N. Dak.; General Petroleum built the Northwest’s first major refinery at Ferndale, Wash. In eastern Washington’s tri-city area (Pasco, Kennewick, Richland), where an inland seaport had been created by McNary Dam, summer tourists water-skied on a 65-mile lake where sagebrush once grew.
Texans co*cked their ten-gallon hats as the Lone Star State passed another milestone in its rapid industrialization. Phase One brought refineries to process raw materials from the state’s underground wealth; Phase Two, bringing plants to convert the raw materials into semi-finished products, was heralded in 1954 by the opening of Texas Eastman’s new polyethylene plant at Longview. Texans knew that Phase Three was close at hand: new factories to turn out finished plastic products ranging from squeeze bottles to floor coverings. Said President D. A. Hulcy of Lone Star Gas Co.: “I just can’t see any reason to be pessimistic about the outlook for 1955 and the years ahead.”
While the uranium boom was measured in pennies on Wall Street and in Salt Lake City, it was measured on the Colorado Plateau by new mines and new refineries to process the radioactive ore. Denver, capital of the new oil and uranium empire stretching from New Mexico and Arizona to Montana and the Dakotas, was throwing up new skyscrapers and expanding so fast that there was concern lest it outgrow its water supply. Fast-growing California made big strides in one of the newest industries (Los Angeles became one of the nation’s biggest electronics centers) and in one of the oldest: it was the No. 3 cotton-producing state. But Dixie was still gaining as a manufacturer. Examples: Oregon’s Jantzen Knitting Mills started making its bathing suits in far-off South Carolina, where the costs were lower. At Calhoun, Tenn. Britain’s largest postwar investment in the U.S. took shape in Bowater’s new $60 million newsprint mill. At a country crossroads, in the piney woods of southeast Georgia, a new $25 million Rayonier mill started turning out raw materials for rayon, Cellophane and photographic film. In Florida booming frozen-juice plants were joined by new processors of southern seafood and vegetables. And huge drilling barges, their steel legs in the air like overturned spider crabs, floated grotesquely in the Gulf of Mexico as oilmen probed for offshore riches.
Strength v. Weakness. In the past, Dixie’s gain has been New England’s loss. But in 1954 the National Planning Association studied the Northeast’s prospects and delivered an optimistic judgment: “Demonstrated strength offset demonstrated weaknesses.” In Massachusetts textile orders were up 29% from 1953, leather and shoe orders up 21%, chemical orders up a thumping 118%. Typical of the area’s change was the new life of 32-year-old Neil Dooley of Danvers, Mass., who quit his foreman’s job at Pequot Mills shortly before the Pequot production was moved south, switched to a position with CBS-Hytron’s electronics plant. At year’s end Dooley was making 25% more money there than he made after three years in his old textile job.
The Midwest stood on the threshold of an industrial renaissance: Cleveland, a new chemical capital, was fast becoming a major auto-producing center with new semi-automatic Ford and Chevrolet factories. Along with Chicago, Detroit and other Great Lakes cities, Cleveland in 1954 could look forward to a new commercial life with the passage of the St. Lawrence Seaway Act. In a few years the new waterway would make them world-trading seaports.
The New Revolution. Behind the smooth and modern facades of the nation’s new factories, whole new industries were being born. The electronics industry, which had opened up new ways for waging war with guided missiles, was also pushing the U.S. into a new peacetime age—and a new Industrial Revolution. It was being brought about by “automation.” The science was too new for the word to be defined in any standard dictionary, but it was already in general use. In the dawning age of automation, machines were not only being substituted for human muscles; they were also being substituted for the human brain.
Out from the factories of many companies poured the machines that would run the factories of the future—machines that could control scores of manufacturing operations, correct their own mistakes, handle office chores that formerly required scores of clerks. They could also solve incredibly complicated technical problems once beyond the scope of even the biggest staffs of engineers. Among 1954’s automated strides: ¶G.E., U.S. Steel and Metropolitan Life all started using Remington Rand’s $1,000,000 Univac for totting up payrolls, writing checks and figuring costs (estimated first-year savings to G.E.: $500,000). International Business Machines (whose stock rose more than 100 points during the year, to 363) was coming out with a similar machine.
¶ Rock Island Refining Corp. opened an automated refinery at Indianapolis in which machines made the necessary adjustments in temperature, pressure, etc. to keep the plant running properly.
¶ Detroit’s Cross Co. made a machine for General Motors that performs 540 operations, turns out 100 engine blocks an hour with the help of but one man.
The march of the robots seemed so swift that C.I.O. President Walter Reuther warned direly of the “depression and chaos” that automation might cause if not instituted under a broad plan. But in the long run automation was bound to boost the standard of living by increasing productivity and creating new jobs in the building and maintaining of the new machines. Said another C.I.O. boss, the late Philip Murray, in 1951: “I do not know of a single, solitary instance where a great technological gain has taken place in the U.S. that it has actually thrown people out of work.” The Age of the Atom. The age of atomic power changed from dream to the threshold of reality in 1954. The new Atomic Energy Act brought the atom out from behind the closed doors of Government monopoly and gave industry the right — and incentive — to build, own and operate atomic-power plants. Some 1,000 companies were already using radioactive isotopes to check on processes and materials; scores of utility companies were forming combines to step into the atomic age.
New York’s Consolidated Edison started to work on plans for a reactor, announced that within five to ten years the city might have atomic power. American Locomotive Co. won a $2,096,753 AEC contract to build an atomic generator that can be broken down and flown anywhere in the world. Said General Electric’s President Ralph Cordiner: “By 1976, half of all new electric-power installations will be atomic.” The changes came almost too fast to be counted. Westinghouse and Duquesne Light started work for the Government on the nation’s first full-scale (60,000 kw.) atomic-power plant at Shippingport, Pa., though AEC knew the plant would be obsolete by the time it was finished, in 1957. And on Wall Street, the uranium bulls were already hedging their bets with such stocks as Foote Minerals (up 170%) and Lithium Corp. (up 400%) on the chance that lithium, not uranium, might prove to be the basic atomic fuel of the future.
Clear & Turning Cloudy. As 1954 ended, the atmosphere was vastly different from what it was as the year began. Almost every economic indicator pointed upward, and business was better than it had been all year. What was the outlook for 1955? For the first six months, better than ever. Beyond that, the economic weather was not so clear. But there was hope that if the first-half upsurge continued, 1955 would be the best and biggest business year on record, with a gross national product of perhaps $370 billion, up 4% from 1954. Some of the goals:
¶ 5,800,000 cars v. 5,500,000 in 1954.
¶ 1,300,000 houses v. 1,200,000.
¶ 100 million tons of steel v. 87 million.
But 1955’s horizon was not cloudless. Industry planned to spend about 5% less ($20.7 billion) on new plants and equipment than in 1954, largely because of a 40% spending cut by automakers from the record $1.3 billion new-model outlay in 1954. Some industries, e.g., textiles and coal, were still in trouble. The farm problem was still tremendous. Though Agriculture Secretary Ezra Benson won a notable victory in his fight for flexible supports—and farmers, like investors, seemed willing once again to take a chance—the surplus commodities held by the Government totaled $6.6 billion at year’s end v. $4.2 billion in 1953. Union labor, which was as cautious as businessmen during 1954’s dip (strikes were at the lowest level since the war), was sure to come to the bargaining table with big, new demands. The key issue: the guaranteed annual wage. The promised cuts in excise and corporate taxes would probably be postponed. The bookkeeping budget in fiscal 1956 would have a deficit of some $3 billion (though the cash budget, including Social Security receipts, might be balanced). In any case, the towering national debt would not be cut.
But for any weak spots in 1955 there would be a host of counterbalancing strengths in the economy, as there had been in 1954. The economy had grown so fast that the debt, like defense spending, was not the burden it once was. In 1945, for instance, the debt equaled 129% of the gross national product; now it was only 76% of the G.N.P. And the economy was still growing not only in productive capacity but in the number of consumers to use the products. In 1954, for the first time, the birth rate topped 4,000,000, while the death rate was the lowest on record.
With that kind of growth, public works were no longer talked of as pump primers but as necessities for a population of 190 million and an economy of $500 billion by 1965.
The new confidence was born of achievement and backed by planning. The Eisenhower Administration, while still firm in the idea that private industry should carry the major load in supplying the nation’s new power needs—a policy that hit the front pages in 1954’s Dixon-Yates dispute—was scheduling more public-power starts for 1955. It was also bringing order out of the helter-skelter highway program, was planning a $100 billion spending program for the next ten years. Businessmen, under the new tax law, could also plan for the automated future. Under a new law they had the incentive of fast tax write-offs to rebuild or modernize their plants. They would have to step fast. Said RCA’s Chairman David Sarnoff: “Almost everything used in our business today will be obsolete a decade hence. This is nothing to worry about, for our industry has lived on obsolescence.” From Wall Street to the West, such self-generating growth built confidence—and the confidence hastened the growth. Like businessmen, consumers were planning to conquer obsolescence, and the probability of lower prices in 1955 would help them.
Sears, Roebuck’s 1955 spring catalogue, out last week, listed price cuts averaging 3½%. Customers no longer bought their houses for a lifetime; in developments such as Levittown, N.Y.
and Woodhurst in Fort Wayne, Ind., they bought them like cars — fully equipped with all appliances — and traded them in for a new and better model every few years as their families grew. Budgets were no longer planned on how much an item cost, but on how easily it could be paid for on the installment plan. Thus, builders who had once thought the housing boom could not last were talking about a million or more new houses a year for the next five years. In the new age of automation, there was already talk of a four-day work week, which would mean a huge new boom for sports, tourism, entertainment, and every other leisure-time industry.
Capitalizing on Capitalism. No one thought that the U.S.
could realize the exciting future all by itself. “One of the main factors that kept our recession last winter from getting worse,” said Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s Winthrop W.
Aldrich, “was the maintenance of a high demand for our goods abroad.” In 1954 the U.S. proved its inherent strength to the world, and by doing so may have caused the men in the Krem lin to moderate their aggressive ambitions. In 1955 the job would be to prove that what has worked for the U.S. can work just as well abroad.
U.S. businessmen like Clarence B. Randall and Henry Ford have already taken the lead in pleading for lower tariffs, and others have shown the way by setting up plants abroad. With U.S. capital factories were turning out hydraulic presses in The Netherlands, antibiotics in the Philippines, refrigerators in Sao Paulo. Builder Harry Morrison, constructing dams and roads all over the world, was one of the nation’s new industrial ambassadors. So was G.M.’s Harlow Curtice, who announced a $180 million expansion plan for his European plants.
In its effort to get government out of business, the Republican Administration has made notable strides at home. But overseas, the job of switching foreign aid from government to private management is just beginning. Paradoxically, the great U.S. boom has tended to hold down private ventures abroad, since the opportunities at home have been so rich. A businessman’s program providing incentive for more private capital and know-how to flow overseas would help the free world compete with Communism by capitalizing on capitalism itself. If the U.S. and foreign nations worked together to make investment abroad inviting, there was little doubt that free enterprising Americans would do the rest. The Export-Import Bank has already announced plans to expand its loans to companies doing business abroad, and the U.N. will set up a new International Finance Corp. to make venture-capital loans for foreign investment.
But more is needed, including 1) removal of the present double taxation on profits earned and taxed abroad, and 2) tax relief in the U.S. for companies that have been given tax waivers by foreign nations as an inducement to invest abroad. For their part, the foreign nations that need and want U.S. investment must encourage it. Having seen what a free economy did for the U.S. in 1954, they can move more surely toward economic freedom by lessening their own restrictions on trade and currency. Said Free Trader Clarence Randall: “The whole world is throbbing with new life and vitality. It is America’s destiny to lead this new world for the betterment of all mankind. We must and will measure up.”
*If Defense Secretary Charles Wilson had not been required to sell his G.M.
stock when he took office two years ago, he would be $1,000,000 richer.
