Just one year to the week after the stock market shuddered through its
worst crash since 1929, new records are being set by that intricate,
delicate and unpredictable entity known as the U.S. economy. The
spectators are surprised, the analyzers are rewriting their textbooks,
and even the captains of U.S. business are somewhat amazed. The
exasperating, exuberant 1963 economy, whose performance had for months
been dismissed as puny and inadequate, is off and running in what the
experts now believe will be the longest period of prosperity since the
Korean war. The U.S. economy was shifted into high gear by a combination of
concurring factors: a buying splurge by the U.S. public, a more
favorable presidential attitude toward business, the use of traditional
but effective tools by Government, and the increasing willingness of
industry's decision makers to spend, lend, build, modernize and expand.
These factors came together at a time when the American people and
Government realized that the economy was not living up to its
potential—and needed a push to get it moving. Once all pushed
together, the economy willingly took off. The three pistons that propel the economy—consumer spending,
businessmen's spending and Government spending—are all pumping once
more in unison. Production, profits and purchasing power are running at
records. The reports from autos, steel and retail sales are bullish. On
Wall Street the stock market has come back to within 15 points of its
all-time 1961 high of 734.91. The business pickup has been greeted by
every name, from the grudging “seasonal upswing” to the barely
restrained “boomlet” now used in an advertisement by staid Standard &
Poor's. The economy's performance has not yet earned the title of
boom—and may never—but no one is willing to minimize how far and how
fast it will go. Accent on Optimism. That depends, to a considerable extent, on the prime
movers of private business, whose massive corporations have been called
“the dominant nongovernmental institutions of American life.” The men
at the top judge the state of the economy with a mixture of facts and
instinct. Whenever they meet —whether over candlelit dining tables in
the White House or in clubs from San Francisco's Pacific Union to
Manhattan's Links—they are constantly poking and prodding the U.S.
body economic and creating the delicate consensus known as business
mood. What is their mood now? Having been fooled once, many of them take refuge in the safety of
“cautious optimism”—but the accent is on optimism. William Allan
Patterson. 63, the breezy former banker who heads United Air Lines,
feels “a great weight lifting from my shoulders” as a result of the
economy's pickup. Metropolitan Life Insurance President Gilbert
Fitzhugh, 53, who puts in an 80-hour week investing the insurance
savings of 44 million Americans and Canadians, thinks that nowadays
“individual businessmen are more optimistic than the economists.” John
F. Gordon, 63, an Annapolis-trained engineer who climbed the corporate
stairs to the presidency of General Motors, sees “no reason to register
anything but optimism.”
