Price Increases Quotes
The practice worked fine in the Automobile industry, until there was intense competition from imported cars, and price increases were not easy to sustain and keep market share at the same time. When the automobile executives made some bad decisions, there was great conflict with the Unions who argued that it was the management that made the big mistakes and therefore the workers should not have to reduce their remuneration, and the automobile companies were caught in a death spiral where there costs were too high for the cars they made, the quality had slipped in an effort to save costs, and they did not make the smaller, low gas mileage cars that were in demand. The industry would have failed completely had it not been for the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations working together to bail out the American auto companies to the distress of many conservative ideologues in and out of Congress. See {637913} for a classic right wing ideological response to bailouts earlier.
There were not many large companies in the agribusiness selling chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides and seeds to the farmers of America. When there was an attempted merger, the regulators were supposed to make sure that the merger press would not be responsible for higher prices as with the merger, there would be less competition. As Holcomb said in this quotation, the companies would typically tell the regulators how they merger would produce synergistic cost savings for the farm products. And in theory that wold be true in most cases. However once the company receives approval, the tend to claim the products are losing money and they must raise prices. And often that is true but the main reason for the loss is the cost of the money that they usually borrowed to pay for the acquisition.
Nominal GDP, or NGDP, counts the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States, not adjusted for inflation
