News stories from Monday February 3, 1975
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- President Ford forecast that the nation's unemployment rate would be about 8 percent of the labor force for the rest of this year and next year as he submitted a budget of $349.4 billion to Congress. The new budget will have the largest peacetime deficit in history, $51.9 billion for the fiscal year starting July 1. The deficit will be much bigger if, as expected, Congress rejects most of an unpopular $17 billion package of spending cuts President Ford has proposed. [New York Times]
- "It must mean that he's going to be a two-year president," said Representative Sam Gibbons, Democrat of Florida. His remark reflected the shock and indignation professed by leading Democrats in Congress that President Ford's budget anticipated high unemployment for the rest of the decade. Senator Hubert Humphrey, chairman of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, declared in a Senate speech that it was "unbelievable" that the President could propose record federal deficits and "not put America back to work." [New York Times]
- Businessmen, traditional foes of deficit spending, seemed to be accepting with resignation the $51.9 billion deficit projected in President Ford's budget for fiscal 1976, but some expressed support. "My conservatism causes me to blink several times," Joseph McFarland, chairman of General Mills, Inc., said, "but I don't see what else you can do." [New York Times]
- The House Ways and Means Committee approved an $8.4 billion reduction in taxes on 1975 income for persons with low and moderate incomes. The tax relief this year would involve an increase in the minimum standard deduction and a special tax credit for the working poor and would be in addition to a rebate of a portion of 1974 income taxes that the committee is expected to adopt later this week. [New York Times]
- The General Motors Corporation reported that its profits for the final quarter of 1974 fell 2 percent from the same period a year earlier, and that its 1974 earnings were down 60 percent. The company, no longer the world's largest industrial corporation -- its earnings are now exceeded by those of the Exxon Corporation and other oil companies -- said its fourth-quarter earnings totaled $508 million, or $1.76 a share, compared with $517 million, or $1.80 a share, a year earlier. Its dividend this year was reduced to 60 cents a share to conserve capital, the chairman said. [New York Times]
- Secretary of State Kissinger disclosed an American plan that he said would aid the development of new sources of energy in the West. Under the plan, the cost of imported oil would be kept high enough to encourage oil companies to continue to invest in searches for other forms of energy, and it would also assure them that once they had found an energy alternative challenging the supremacy of oil, they would not be confronted with a sudden drop in the price of oil, which would make their alternative noncompetitive. [New York Times]
- The government of President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam closed down five opposition newspapers and continued the arrests of journalists that began quietly over the weekend. On Sunday, the government confiscated the editions of those five papers and four others after they published a new "indictment" of Mr. Thieu by the Catholic-led People's Anticorruption Movement, saying Mr. Thieu should be "charged with high treason" for political crimes. [New York Times]
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Stock Market Report
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 711.44 (+7.75, +1.10%)
Arms Index is the ratio of volume per declining issue to volume per advancing issue; a figure below 1.0 is bullish. | |||||||||||||||
| Market Index Trends | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Date | DJIA | S&P | Volume* |
| January 31, 1975 | 703.69 | 76.98 | 24.64 |
| January 30, 1975 | 696.42 | 76.21 | 29.74 |
| January 29, 1975 | 705.96 | 77.26 | 27.41 |
| January 28, 1975 | 694.77 | 76.03 | 31.75 |
| January 27, 1975 | 692.66 | 75.37 | 32.13 |
| January 24, 1975 | 666.61 | 72.98 | 20.67 |
| January 23, 1975 | 656.76 | 72.07 | 17.96 |
| January 22, 1975 | 652.61 | 71.74 | 15.33 |
| January 21, 1975 | 641.90 | 70.70 | 14.78 |
| January 20, 1975 | 647.45 | 71.08 | 13.45 |