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While more steel was produced in 1953 than ever before, so were more plastics. Chevrolet's Corvette, with a Fiberglas body, was just getting into mass production; it might be the forerunner of a whole new school of automobile design and materials. The chemical industry, cashing in on the new field of petrochemicals, was finding new markets every day; polyethylene, for example, once known merely as the squeeze-bottle plastic, was replacing rubber, metal and even other plastics in everything from piping to poker chips. Textile makers had to cope with a bewildering new array of synthetic materials for clothing and furnishings; in 1953 an entire apartment could be furnished with materials drawn from a test tube. Nowhere was change more evident than in television. With the approval of color TV at year's end, that burly youth was suddenly transformed into an entirely new industry for which the 25 million owners of black-and-white sets are all potential customers.
But for businessmen who go after it, a huge market still exists. The population is growing at the rate of 2,600,000 a year, and, even without that growth, big markets are still to be tapped. Of America's 45 million families, 35% still do not own a car, only 12% own home freezers, only 2% an air conditioner. Said Atlanta Investment Banker Richard Courts: "We have mastered production, but we have not yet mastered consumption." Among the mass-production goals for 1954:
¶5,500,000 autos v. 6,000,000 in 1953.
¶ 5,500,000 TV sets v. 7,000,000.
¶ 1,300,000 air conditioners v. 1,000,000.
¶ 3,500,000 refrigerators v. 3,700,000.
Despite the huge expansion since the war, there is still a big potential demand in the field of capital goods. More than half the 2,000,000 machine tools in use, for example, are at least ten years old, and 25% of them are 20 years old. Utility men, who have already spent $16 billion since the war on expansion, plan to spend another $3 billion in 1954.
It is not enough, however, to look for new markets merely within the shores of the U.S. Said Dwight Eisenhower last year: "Our whole economy turns and depends on the commerce of the world."
Since World War II's end, the U.S. has tried to increase that commerce by spending $42 billion in foreign aid to bolster up the free world's economies. On its part, private business has also invested more than $8 billion abroad.
Moscow Gold v. Free Trade
By both public and private investments, foreign nations have been vastly strengthened. But the dollar gap is still big; in 1953 the U.S. exported $16 billion in goods while importing $11 billion, leaving a gap of $5 billion. Actually, since war's end, the $42 billion in U.S. aid just about equals the difference in U.S. exports and imports; in effect, it has paid for the surplus of U.S. exports over imports. With foreign aid scheduled to be cut drastically this year, foreign nations will be able to close the dollar gap only by bigger sales in the U.S.