When the South African diamond fields were opened, a serious difficulty with violently fluctuating diamond prices at once arose. Many people buy jewels as a sort of investment, and this type of buying was discouraged by the lively ups and downs of the prices for the white stones under natural conditions of supply and demand. Hence the De Beers Company assumed the function of buying, carrying and distributing at stable prices diamonds obtained from the South
African fields. For many years before the War, the price of diamonds was set by this company in...
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