Metals: More in Sorrow than in Anger

¢METALS

Back in October 1965, the nation's aluminum industry announced price increases, only to back down when the inflation-wary Johnson Administration threatened to dump Government stockpiles on the open market. Last week, following a wave of price hikes on other basic metals, major aluminum producers decided to try again. This time the Administration reacted through Gardner Ackley, the President's chief economic adviser, who criticized what he called an "ill-timed sequence of price increases."

Ackley apparently spoke more in sorrow than in anger—and this seems to have been the pattern in recent metal price hikes. When the leading U.S. copper companies, which had...