Word: trading
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with speakeasies running in a thousand Manhattan basements, Frank Costello threw his bankroll into the rum trade. It was an enormous and complex business which involved the systematic bribery of thousands of policemen, the timed dispatching of speedboats and trucks, the direction of sales and bookkeeping staffs, the printing of fake labels, the operation of cutting plants and the purchase of fortunes in whisky. To the tough hoodlums who were its soldiers, it was also extremely hazardous...
Britain's Labor government and British labor were heading for a showdown. For more than two years, the trade unions had grudgingly gone along with the government's policy of virtually freezing wages & prices. But when devaluation of the pound thawed out some prices and sent them climbing upwards, the unions' rank & file rebelled. Britain's T.U.C. (Trades Union Congress) presented new demands: higher wages, more government subsidies to keep food prices down, additional taxes to cut down business profits...
...decisions binding on its members, but it looked as if most of its unions would stick to the agreement. British labor was still learning the hard lesson that Britain's Socialist government could be a good deal tougher than the bosses with whom Ernie Bevin bargained in his trade-union days...
Delicacy & Common Sense. This did not mean that the British, who are determined at all cost to carry on trade with Red China, wanted to pick a fight with the Communists if they could possibly avoid it. "We don't want to provoke the Communists," said a political adviser to the Hong Kong government. "We are delicately balancing many factors and trying to exercise common sense...
...Kong from the Chinese during the Opium War, the rocky island which the Chinese contemptuously called a "penguin's nest" has become a traders' and tourists' delight. Despite civil war on the mainland and the Nationalist blockade of China's coast, Hong Kong's trade this year may reach an alltime high. Daily, British and American ships slip into Hong Kong's harbor; nightly, huge motor junks, heavy with Western merchandise, weigh anchor for the ports of Red China...