Friendly Warning

Trustbuster Stanley N. Barnes last week delivered a friendly warning to the auto industry. Said Barnes in a speech before the Manhattan convention of the Nation al Wholesale Dry Goods Association: "An undue concentration is becoming more and more sharply recognizable in the automobile industry, and if it continues, [it] will require action of some kind to solve." His biggest objection: the Big Three last year accounted for 95.7% of auto sales v. 94.4% in 1954. While General Motors kept a 50.3% share of the market, Chrysler boosted its share from 12.9% to 17.1%--"at the expense of Ford and not General Motors."

Barnes did not say how much of the business Ford, Chrysler, or G.M. has a right to expect, or just how the Government could try to regulate their shares. Commented the Wall Street Journal: "We doubt very much if Mr. Barnes will ever be able to set any such figures, for the fact of the matter is that they are set by the public . . . There is no law we know of which allows a Government agency to force people to buy a car different from the one they want."

Trustbuster Barnes last week solved a problem that had been worrying him in another big industry. Hotelman Conrad Hilton, whose growing empire (25 U.S. hotels, three more overseas with another five abuilding) now stretches halfway around the world, signed a consent decree formally ending the antitrust suit filed against Hilton last April after he acquired the Statler Hotel chain. Hilton agreed to sell two hotels (probably Washington's Mayflower, Manhattan's Roosevelt or New Yorker) in addition to the two (Los Angeles' Town House, St. Louis' Jefferson) he has already sold. Hilton also promised not to buy any more hotels in these four cities before 1961 without first checking with the Justice Department.

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