Tape 127 - Answers to listeners questions

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Announcer	Welcome once again	0:02
	as MIT professor Paul Samuelson discusses	0:03
	the current economic scene.	0:05
	This program series is produced	0:07
	by Instructional Dynamics Inc.	0:08
	This program was recorded May 3rd.	0:11
Paul	This is a good time to catch up	0:14
	on some of the mail and on some of the questions	0:15
	that have been sent to me by subscribers to these tapes.	0:18
	I have here a letter of about a month ago.	0:24
	"Dear Dr. Samuelson, it looks like the best way	0:29
	to anticipate economic developments these days	0:31
	is to think of the boldest and most unexpected	0:34
	initiative President Nixon can make."	0:36
	This was before Watergate.	0:39
	"The one idea that might fit his style	0:40
	is the sudden demonetization of gold.	0:42
	By this I mean an announcement	0:45
	that we with or without our economic allies have decided	0:48
	to liquidate our gold stock by a combination	0:51
	of open market sales and a series of sealed bids.	0:53
	At least a forceful move such as this would give substance	0:57
	to the frequently heard public pronouncements	0:59
	that gold is an overrated barbaric metal.	1:01
	If it is let's get out while the price is high.	1:04
	We could also save several millions I'm sure	1:07
	in the upkeeping of Fort Knox.	1:10
	Is this a realistic idea?"	1:12
	I don't think that,	1:16
	you should bet that the president is likely unilaterally	1:20
	in the next six months to make a bold announcement	1:23
	of this sort, but the suggestion is definitely	1:28
	in the spirit of the times.	1:32
	There actually is legislation on its way through Congress.	1:34
	I believe the best informed observers think	1:38
	that the legislation will probably go through Congress.	1:40
	Which will give American citizens the right once again	1:44
	to hold gold, a right which they haven't had since 1933.	1:48
	I'm not now talking about the holding	1:53
	in our mouths of gold dental inlays.	1:57
	I'm not talking about gold in our wedding rings and watches.	2:00
	Nor in decorative jewelry,	2:04
	or gold relays in complicated electronic circuits.	2:07
	I'm not even talking about old gold coins	2:13
	because any gold coin made before 1934	2:15
	it's perfectly legal for you and for me to hold.	2:19
	We can hold American Eagles,	2:24
	in fact those 20 dollar gold pieces,	2:26
	five dollar gold pieces,	2:28
	10 dollar gold pieces are way, way up.	2:30
	They're way, way up by much more than the increase	2:33
	in the price of the gold metal	2:36
	which when they were coined was 21 dollars an ounce	2:38
	and which now in the free market	2:41
	is selling somewhere around the 90 dollars an ounce.	2:43
	I'm talking about being able to treat gold exactly	2:48
	like any other commodity.	2:52
	Being able to buy and sale futures for gold	2:54
	in the Chicago organized market,	2:58
	in exactly the way that you and I can buy futures	3:02
	on soybeans, on wheat, on pork bellies, and on silver.	3:06
	Now Congress is, I'm informed,	3:12
	likely both houses to pass such a bill.	3:16
	However, it's likely to go through in the form	3:19
	that it doesn't become law upon the passage	3:22
	of the legislation but will be enacted into	3:26
	being by the decision of the president	3:30
	at a time when he thinks that it's alright to do so.	3:34
	This is part of the increased discretionary powers	3:38
	which Congress is sometimes willing	3:41
	to give to the president.	3:45
	In my view, it would be a mistake	3:48
	to pass that bill without the presidential discretion	3:53
	so that sometime in the next few months,	3:58
	you or I could hold gold.	4:01
	How can I say that, when I am on record,	4:04
	and I wish to reaffirm that fact that I am in favor	4:06
	of phasing out gold from the monetary system.	4:09
	It's precisely because I want to phase gold out	4:13
	from the monetary system that I don't want anything	4:17
	to happen in the short-run which is going vastly	4:21
	to increase the demand for gold.	4:24
	Because the more valuable gold becomes	4:27
	I think the more difficult it is for us	4:30
	to get it out of the system.	4:32
	Now my subscriber you notice, has not proposed anything	4:35
	which would increase the demand for gold.	4:40
	Quite the contrary his proposal is completely	4:42
	within the spirit and the letter	4:45
	of the Royce Subcommittee of the Joint Economic Committee.	4:47
	Which on a bipartisan basis advocated the selling off	4:51
	the selling off of our gold	4:58
	either unilaterally or with the cooperation	5:00
	of the other members of the club of 10	5:04
	in the 125 nation family of the International Monetary Fund.	5:08
	And I must say that there are certain merits	5:14
	in that proposal, on balance I'm not sure	5:19
	that I would go for it at this time	5:21
	but let me give them the most favorable case for it.	5:24
	The most favorable case for it would be that	5:26
	every sober rational well informed person	5:32
	would be able to form the judgment	5:37
	that our allies are with us	5:40
	in phasing gold out of the monetary system.	5:42
	So that process would not be jeopardized	5:44
	by anything that happens.	5:48
	That I may say is a, an assumption	5:49
	completely contrary to fact.	5:52
	We don't even have gold out of our own ideology.	5:54
	I mean by our the American people's ideology.	5:58
	And you may be sure that the French	6:02
	and in lesser degree the Dutch and the Belgians	6:04
	just take an example still have a great deal	6:09
	of the gold bug in their system.	6:12
	And the Japanese have just been given the right	6:16
	to import gold, to hold gold.	6:19
	This has been an increase in the demand for gold.	6:23
	I think that it has definite repercussions	6:26
	for the free price.	6:29
	The result is that since it's very problematical	6:32
	that we will in fact be able to smoothly	6:35
	and with confidence get gold out of the monetary system.	6:38
	You must always have contingency planning	6:42
	on the basis of the considerable probability	6:45
	that instead of gold going out	6:47
	of the monetary system it will come back.	6:49
	And I may say if it does come back,	6:52
	if it comes back with a more formal role	6:54
	than it now has you may be sure it's not gonna come back	6:56
	at the	6:59
	21 dollars an ounce.	7:02
	The rate that prevailed before 1914,	7:04
	and prevailed before 1933,	7:08
	when Franklin Roosevelt unilaterally devalued the dollar.	7:12
	It's not gonna come back at the 35 dollar an ounce rate	7:15
	which prevailed for most of the years since 1935.	7:18
	It's not gonna come back at the 38 dollars an ounce rate	7:24
	which prevailed between	7:27
	December 1971 when the Smithsonian agreement was signed	7:30
	and the breakdown of that agreement	7:33
	in just February of this year.	7:36
	And my suspicion is that if gold comes back	7:39
	in a more prominent role it will certainly not come back	7:42
	at an official price,	7:45
	that now prevails which is 42 dollars and 22 cents an ounce.	7:48
	So if you're gonna go selling off our stockpile	7:53
	of this raw material from Fort Knox.	7:58
	You want to be sure that you get a good price for it.	8:01
	As good a price as you can get later.	8:05
	My correspondent,	8:08
	seems to think that the 90 dollars an ounce price	8:11
	which prevails now is a good high temporary price	8:14
	and we ought to unload while the unloading is good.	8:17
	I don't know that he's wrong in that.	8:20
	He may well be right.	8:23
	However, you mustn't think that	8:25
	that price will stay the same if we and a large number	8:28
	of other nations change the	8:33
	agreement.	8:37
	The two-tiered gold system agreement	8:38
	made in March of 1967 or 1968,	8:40
	and begin to dump gold on the market in billions of dollars.	8:44
	Because that will mean of course	8:49
	that like anybody who owns a lot of stock	8:52
	in comparison to the total floating supply.	8:54
	Although Ross Perot is a	8:57
	billionaire on paper if he really tried	9:00
	to sale all of this stock he would so knock down the price	9:02
	that he couldn't do it.	9:06
	This is a very important consideration realized	9:08
	by sophisticated economists	9:11
	that only when you are a price taker	9:13
	as a small part of a very large comparative market	9:16
	can the quoted market prices be construed	9:20
	to be realistic prices at which you could sell.	9:23
	I should digress to say that its a very foolish position	9:27
	in my judgment to believe that the dollars	9:33
	which are held abroad in such great amounts.	9:37
	70, 80 odd billions of dollars are voluntarily held.	9:39
	Precisely these imperfections	9:43
	of competition consideration supply	9:46
	and there's a very simple test I've tried this out	9:49
	on central bankers all over the world,	9:52
	and I've tried it out on informed opinion.	9:54
	And there's always only one universal answer.	9:56
	Let us make the following test,	9:59
	the United States government will agree	10:00
	to take off the hands of the German Central Bank	10:02
	five billion of their redundant dollars.	10:07
	If they really want those dollars,	10:12
	then they would say no and on that offer	10:14
	they would refuse at the official price	10:17
	to make the negotiation.	10:19
	Well don't hold your breath until the United States	10:21
	is in a position to make such an offer,	10:23
	but I can assure you that they would jump at it.	10:25
	The Japanese would jump at it,	10:28
	and so by the only meaningful test these dollars abroad	10:30
	are not voluntarily held at the existing price.	10:34
	They're only voluntarily held in the sense	10:39
	that anybody who has a monopoly, say of coffee,	10:41
	or of rubber as with the Stevenson Agreements.	10:46
	Hold something off the market because he knows	10:48
	that the more he sells in what may even be	10:50
	an inelastic market the less receipts he will actually get.	10:54
	I have said that I don't disagree	11:01
	that the 90 dollar price of gold is high.	11:03
	But it doesn't mean that I agree.	11:06
	I think that it's quite possible	11:09
	particularly if more countries do what Japan just did.	11:12
	Enable their citizens to take speculative positions	11:18
	in gold that you will have such a short-run,	11:20
	five years say, increase in the demand for gold.	11:25
	That the price of 90 dollars could go much higher.	11:29
	After all, there's nothing that is holding	11:32
	that price down or up.	11:34
	It is not the demand of dentists,	11:38
	and of jewelers, and of electronic engineers	11:42
	that is determining that price of gold.	11:46
	It is not primarily the supply of gold	11:49
	from Russian mines, from Canadian mines,	11:52
	from the very few American mines,	11:55
	and of course abundantly from the South African mines	11:57
	that's determining that price.	12:01
	The price of gold is being determined	12:03
	by what one speculative holder of gold thinks	12:05
	another speculative holder of gold	12:10
	will be willing at some future date to pay for it.	12:13
	And in such a situation,	12:16
	you are precisely where you were centuries ago	12:18
	at the time of the so called Tulip Mania in Holland.	12:22
	In Holland suddenly everybody decided	12:27
	that Tulips were going to go up in price,	12:29
	and so a bulb which cost a gilder went up to 10 gilders.	12:32
	But why should it stop there?	12:37
	Why shouldn't it be 100 gilders?	12:38
	Why shouldn't it be a 1000 gilders?	12:40
	And pretty soon for one tulip bulb you'd have	12:41
	to give the equivalent of the cost	12:44
	of a fancy carriage and a team of horses	12:45
	to pull that carriage.	12:50
	If you like you can say this is the greater fool theory,	12:53
	and that the man who is sober and sane	12:56
	throughout the process is just throwing away	12:59
	his family's money because	13:01
	it's right there for the pickings.	13:03
	Well every Ponzi game, every chain letter scheme runs out	13:05
	of suckers after a time.	13:11
	People are wrong by the way,	13:13
	to think that it runs out of suckers	13:14
	because there is only a certain number of people.	13:16
	And you say well when a million people	13:18
	are in the chain letter it might still begin to roll.	13:20
	But since there are only 200 million people	13:22
	in the American country you're soon going	13:24
	to run out of all the people.	13:26
	Well that is an understatement because what happens	13:28
	is the same sucker when he finds he can make a sure thing	13:31
	of 12 percent on his money he doubles up	13:34
	and brings his money back.	13:39
	And therefore we have no economic theory	13:40
	to determine how long such a mania will persist.	13:43
	So it is with respect to gold	13:49
	and I could not rule out that gold	13:51
	will be 150 dollars an ounce at some future date	13:54
	when I'm talking on tape like this.	13:58
	On the other hand, I can't rule out	13:59
	that it won't go back to 60 dollars a share.	14:02
	I've said many unkind thing in my time	14:07
	about the suckers who hold gold equities.	14:11
	And I know a lot of people who for 25,	14:16
	35 years have been owning stocks like Homestake Gold Mining.	14:19
	And they were behind the game	14:23
	in comparison with any ordinary portfolio.	14:26
	That doesn't mean this last year when the price	14:32
	of gold in the free market has gone up	14:33
	to the nine dollar level	14:37
	that they don't have some paper profits.	14:39
	Indeed if you were to take a survey	14:41
	of which closed end investment funds have done the best	14:43
	in this last few months and in this last year,	14:47
	you would find at the top of the list the Japan Fund.	14:50
	Now we all know the very many solid reasons	14:53
	why a portfolio well chosen	14:56
	of representative Japanese securities	14:59
	might show tremendous capital gains.	15:02
	Capital gains of 50 percent in a years time.	15:05
	But second on that list you would find South African,	15:10
	American South African Gold Trust.	15:13
	Which holds stocks in diamonds in some degree,	15:17
	but for the most part holds South African gold mine shares.	15:21
	Now that isn't surprising because the mines	15:27
	that were breaking even, making a little money	15:32
	when gold had to be sold on the free market	15:35
	at 35 dollars an ounce and that's not very long ago.	15:38
	Or 38 dollars an ounce, or in the 40s.	15:41
	When you can sell at prices of 50 and 60 dollars,	15:43
	and those are the realistic numbers	15:47
	because the price is now 90.	15:49
	But not very much has been capable	15:51
	of being sold at that high price.	15:52
	Then you'll realize that those shares	15:55
	will have an increase in earnings.	15:57
	They'll be entitled to a fair price earnings multiple,	15:59
	and that they will go up in price.	16:03
	So what was silly,	16:07
	stock market behavior from 1945	16:12
	to 1959, to 1965,	16:15
	isn't necessarily silly at a later date.	16:20
	Well to conclude, in fact this is what I've written	16:24
	at the bottom of the letter just a brief word.	16:28
	Our President and Congress are not sure,	16:31
	cannot be sure, that the world will phase out gold	16:34
	from the monetary system for all time.	16:36
	So they are afraid to risk getting rid	16:39
	of all of our official gold on the free market.	16:42
	This despite the urgings of many	16:45
	that they should be more bold.	16:47
	Now I have a second communication from a subscriber.	16:50
	He asks, "Which of the forecasting methods	16:52
	has actually done the best in recent years?	16:56
	I gather that you are not enamored	16:59
	of monetarism but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.	17:02
	How have the different methods actually done?"	17:06
	That's a fair question,	17:10
	and I actually am in a position to give a partial answer	17:14
	to that question just by good luck.	17:18
	I've received through the mail just a few days ago	17:20
	from Ray Fair at Princeton his latest set of forecasts.	17:23
	I'll remind you, that he is a one man,	17:28
	one man with computer forecaster.	17:33
	And he plays the game differently from other forecasters.	17:36
	He does this as a matter of philosophy.	17:40
	He does it in order to test out his methodology.	17:42
	He believes that you should specify your model.	17:45
	You should estimate the coefficients from the data,	17:48
	and then you shouldn't second guess it.	17:51
	You shouldn't adjust the coefficients by judgment,	17:53
	and let the chips fall where they may	17:56
	and then just see what the track record will be	17:58
	over the period of time.	18:00
	And he always gives his own previous forecast,	18:01
	what his errors have been,	18:04
	what his revisions have been, and that's interesting.	18:05
	I may say I think his results have been only fair	18:07
	by that method that was my impression.	18:12
	This time he gives us the materials out of which	18:15
	to make a sharper judgment because he took half a dozen	18:18
	or more regular forecasters and he did the same thing	18:24
	with them which he does for himself.	18:28
	He showed what they first forecast the first time	18:30
	they forecast for a given quarter, what it would be.	18:34
	Then as you move closer, and closer to that quarter	18:36
	they had adjusted their forecasts	18:40
	and he recorded all of these forecasts.	18:42
	And then he calculated after we know the actual	18:45
	how the different forecasters did in terms of error.	18:49
	What their percentage error was,	18:55
	what their absolute error was.	18:57
	whether they were biased on the upside or the downside.	18:58
	And he was able to do this for quite a number	19:02
	of quarters and with quite a number	19:04
	of estimates for the same quarter.	19:06
	And then he simply lists in a table,	19:09
	the different forecasters as to who did the best	19:12
	in this particular period.	19:16
	Now what did it show?	19:18
	At the top of the list, and this was no surprise to me	19:21
	because I've noticed that this particular forecasting model	19:24
	has been having a good run for its money recently,	19:30
	is the University of Michigan.	19:33
	The Ann Arbor, University of Michigan forecast	19:34
	which comes out annually	19:39
	at the outlook session in Ann Arbor	19:40
	in November and which as each quarter's data comes in,	19:45
	gives you a new forecast looking ahead.	19:51
	It has the very best record,	19:53
	both in real terms and in nominal terms.	19:57
	At the bottom of the list,	20:02
	is the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.	20:04
	It's particularly bad as I recall the data	20:07
	on the thing at which it might be hoped	20:12
	it would be particularly good,	20:15
	namely the increase in nominal or money GNP	20:16
	as against the increase in real GNP.	20:23
	That too is no surprise,	20:27
	because although there was an earlier period	20:29
	in which the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis	20:32
	was sort of moving along in step with reality.	20:34
	It's been obvious in, for many quarters now	20:37
	that it has been giving under estimates.	20:41
	That I may say is the only monetarist model	20:45
	that was analyzed by Ray Fair	20:49
	because he didn't have complete data.	20:53
	I keep track however,	20:54
	of a number of other monetarist's forecasts	20:56
	and I used to think that the best of them	21:01
	in terms of track record.	21:04
	In terms of mean error,	21:07
	was the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis,	21:08
	and the best of them in this period	21:11
	has been doing rather poorly.	21:15
	As a matter of fact, most of the monetarist's I know	21:19
	have been, and I don't criticize them I applaud this,	21:22
	have been second guessing their own models.	21:27
	And have been writing them up and have been trying	21:29
	to re-specify the models by whatever it is	21:31
	that will cause the numbers to be larger.	21:34
	I would refer you for example to the forecasts	21:38
	that have come out of the Argus organization	21:41
	and also the forecasting methodology	21:48
	which I commented on once before,	21:51
	by the First National City Bank.	21:53
	Which has put in a trim factor	21:56
	into its coefficients in its velocity.	21:58
	So there's interaction between a time	22:01
	in the lagged money supply and this has the notable function	22:03
	of moving up the forecast.	22:10
	The Chase Econometric Model ranked very high	22:13
	in this period, the Wharton School model did quite well.	22:18
	The Data Resources, Inc. model didn't do quite so well.	22:22
	It's somewhere in the middle.	22:26
	Fair's model by the way does not do very well.	22:27
	It's somewhere just below the middle.	22:29
	I wish that he had had comprehensive data	22:34
	on some of the other models which I follow	22:37
	and which I quote sometime here	22:39
	as for example, the Townsend-Greenspan model.	22:42
	But I think that the picture which Ray Fair gives,	22:45
	is a pretty good picture.	22:48
	I would not myself,	22:50
	judge the profundity of a economic Weltanschauung	22:53
	by how good the R-squares of forecasting are,	23:00
	I think that that's a silly game.	23:03
	But as I've written many times,	23:05
	those who live by the sword have to perish by the sword.	23:07
	And if really all you have to show	23:10
	is good R-squares then when it,	23:12
	when it rains low R-squares	23:17
	then I think you have to be properly penalized.	23:21
	Now let me turn,	23:28
	from those couple a questions	23:31
	to just what's happening right now.	23:33
	As I speak we just had received the news	23:36
	that farm and food prices at the wholesale level,	23:39
	went down in April for the first time in five months.	23:43
	After rising for five months.	23:47
	I think that is good news.	23:48
	I don't think we should make too much	23:50
	of that good news because the,	23:51
	what happens to food prices for the rest	23:54
	of this year and in to the next year will critically depend	23:58
	upon what the harvest season is like.	24:00
	And that's notoriously hard to predict,	24:04
	we all know just reading the headlines	24:07
	that there have been floods of the Mississippi.	24:10
	There is a great deal	24:13
	of very good farmland which is underwater.	24:15
	The planting of corn is going to be very late	24:17
	it's going to be touch and go in many places.	24:19
	And even if some of those fields	24:22
	are planted late in corn you can't utilize fertilizer	24:27
	in the same way because of the interaction	24:31
	between the wheat growing season	24:32
	and the corn growing season.	24:34
	So that I think we have to keep our fingers crossed	24:36
	on how much good news or bad news is going to had.	24:38
	There's a very simple way by the way	24:41
	of getting the best guess I think on these matters.	24:44
	There are about 10,000 people who make their living	24:47
	on trying to guess the future of food prices,	24:50
	and they've put their money where their mouths are.	24:53
	I'm referring to the prices quoted	24:57
	in the Chicago Board of Trade,	25:00
	and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange,	25:01
	and the New York Organized Coffee, Cocoa, Sugar Exchanges.	25:03
	And I have surveyed the pattern of futures prices	25:09
	to see whether there is any great good news ahead	25:15
	or any great bad news ahead, and I must say	25:17
	that it's a fairly spotty picture.	25:20
	And that if there is great good news ahead	25:23
	it is not clear to the best informed people	25:26
	who have money to back their opinions.	25:30
	Now it's true that you will find	25:33
	in some of the crops after the harvest season	25:35
	the future's price quoted is lower than the present price.	25:38
	That is nothing to write home about,	25:42
	that is a normal phenomenon.	25:45
	On the other hand I don't think you find it quite	25:47
	as much this year as in ordinary years.	25:48
	If you take corn itself for example January corn	25:51
	ought to be a good deal less than September corn	25:55
	and that wasn't the case a couple days ago	25:57
	when I took a careful look	26:01
	at what the future would bring us	26:02
	as determined by the best judgment of the people	26:05
	in the future's markets of the country.	26:08
	More ominous though in this same announcement	26:12
	was the fact that while farm and food prices	26:15
	were going down a bit in April,	26:18
	wholesale industrial prices showed the biggest increase	26:20
	in many, many, many years.	26:23
	I don't think that one bit of good news washes out one bit	26:25
	of bad news because the bits aren't equal.	26:30
	And in particular industrial prices are notoriously the sort	26:32
	that don't get rolled back	26:35
	by a favorable supply demand situation at a later time.	26:37
	And there's a very great danger	26:41
	that this price increase will be built	26:42
	into the circular flow and therefore	26:45
	those who have been hoping against hope that the price goals	26:50
	of the administration could be realized.	26:53
	Well there are no such people as that,	26:56
	everybody knows that the price goals can't be realized.	26:57
	But who are hoping that those goals would not	26:59
	be breached too badly.	27:01
	I'm afraid this last bit of news	27:05
	is not good and that means for all of us	27:08
	it's something that we should feel a bit sorry about.	27:13
	One last bit of information,	27:21
	I think it was in my last tape that I reported	27:23
	on a very interesting speech that I heard	27:26
	at the Boston Economics Club.	27:28
	This was by Albert Wojnilower	27:31
	of the First Boston Corporation	27:32
	and it was a prospectus of the future to come.	27:34
	Which rather chilled one's blood.	27:37
	Just yesterday a good friend	27:42
	and esteemed economist in the New York Money Market,	27:47
	and a good friend of Albert Wojnilower,	27:51
	Henry Kaufman came to talk to the Boston Economics Club.	27:54
	I guess the Boston Economics Club	27:58
	could really use some guidance	28:00
	at this time because usually our meetings	28:01
	are spaced at least a month apart	28:03
	but these were just a couple weeks apart.	28:05
	And Henry Kaufman came to town,	28:07
	and there was a big crowd out for him.	28:08
	And I, you can be sure went there with my notebook	28:10
	and with my ears wide open	28:14
	because he has had a good track record	28:16
	in the past, he's a very knowing economist.	28:18
	And I have to report to you	28:23
	that there was pretty much the same discouraging news ahead	28:25
	if I understood correctly what Henry Kaufman was saying.	28:30
	Namely that the economy is in too strong a boom.	28:36
	He blames this on past monetary policy,	28:40
	on past fiscal policy.	28:43
	I won't go into that aspect of the problem.	28:45
	He thinks that this means	28:48
	that interest rates still have a good deal	28:49
	of distance to go up,	28:51
	that the boom has to be choked off	28:54
	because everybody has liquidity.	28:58
	Everybody thinks he's insulated .	29:00
	Everybody remembers the past money crunches	29:02
	and that everybody cannot be allowed	29:05
	in a time of over exuberant demand to feel comfortable.	29:07
	To feel insulated, and therefore the squeezer	29:11
	is going to have to be on with the result	29:15
	that by the end of the year instead of the picture	29:18
	being what it is now everybody wanting inventory.	29:23
	By the end of the year they'll be getting the inventory	29:26
	which they now want and which they then won't want.	29:28
	The rate of real growth of the economy will be down,	29:31
	and I guess it's a fair statement	29:34
	that a mini recession is practically a certainty	29:35
	in the mind of Henry Kaufman.	29:40
	And I'm not sure that he doesn't think	29:41
	that it's a good thing, that we'd be worse off	29:43
	if we didn't have that mini recession.	29:45
	Well I'm simply reporting, I'm not editorializing.	29:48
	In future tapes, we can analyze	29:51
	that particular viewpoint and opposing viewpoints.	29:53
Announcer	If you have any comments or questions	29:57
	for Professor Samuelson address them	29:59
	to Instructional Dynamics, Inc.,	30:01
	166 East Superior Street, Chicago, Illinois 60611.	30:03

Item Info

Title:

Tape 127 - Answers to listeners questions

Date:

1973

Contributor:

Samuelson, Paul A. (Paul Anthony), 1915-2009

Subject:

Format:

audiocassettes

Language:

English

Digital Collection:

Paul A. Samuelson papers, 1933-2010 and undated

Source Collection:

Paul A. Samuelson papers, 1933-2010

Series:

Economics Cassette Series: Paul Samuelson

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

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Identifier:

RL10082-CS-0124
ref2387_85q
samuelsonpaul
duke:325147
pstau001124
ark:/87924/r40z71c8k
f0a315b1-510d-4e8d-897f-5e6463359da2

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Tape 127 - Answers to listeners questions

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