Steel: Price Hikes Ahead?

"The clear fact is that we do not make a satisfactory return on the vast sums of money invested. Surely one of the most important misconceptions in the public mind is that a rise in the price of steel—and only steel—can trigger inflation."

The speaker was not U.S. Steel's Roger Blough, from whom the words would have seemed familiar, or any of the other usual spokesmen for the steel industry. It was Joseph L. Block, chairman of Chicago's Inland Steel and the man who, at President Kennedy's bidding, held the price line in 1962, thus forcing his colleagues to rescind...