Word: auction
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gunnysack business. In the mid-'60s the company flourished, selling sandbags used to dam floods along the Mississippi. Jacobs early showed a trader's instinct, buying merchandise at business liquidation sales and reselling it. At 18, he got 300 pairs of skis at a U.S. Customs auction for $13 a pair, then sold them right outside the auction hall for three times as much...
...loveseat, a silver oil lamp, brass candlesticks, a woman's rocker. When Baum cited "an oak bedroom set," she lost control. "These are family heirlooms," she shouted. "They've been in our family for 150 years. They're not for sale." But they were. Under the rules of the auction, the articles could not be split up; all of them would go to the highest single bidder. A lawyer for the Citizens State Bank bid $89,000 for everything, the only bid offered. (The rule was designed to stymie a common practice at other forced sales in which local farmers...
...drive the tractor now, he leaves a piece of his heart out there." The Jensens owe another $400,000 in mortgages on their land. Their 1,120 acres, on which they have raised mostly wheat for the past 27 years, will be sold at a similar involuntary auction this week...
Under the Government program, if a farmer could not unload his leaf at auction, he could still consign it to a "pool," a farmers' cooperative that borrows money from the Government. The pool would then try to sell the tobacco. If it succeeded, the loan was repaid, but if it failed, the Government ate the difference. The cost to taxpayers was small, at least compared with other farm subsidies: $600 million total between 1938 and 1982. Yet increasingly, foes of tobacco began asking why any tax funds should go to a product that the Government itself says is a health...
...program was immediately overwhelmed by shrinking markets at home and abroad. Because of health concerns, a doubling of the excise tax on cigarettes from 8 cents to 16 cents, and cheaper foreign-grown tobacco, about a quarter of the tobacco grown in the U.S. last year went unsold at auction. The farmers' assessment under the loan program was increased from 3 cents to 7 cents for flue-cured, 1 cents to 9 cents for burley, but that covered only $175 million of the $1.6 billion they borrowed between 1982 and 1984 and are legally obliged to pay back...