shade from the past was rising again—John D. Rockefeller and the prospect of an all-out price war. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rockefeller and his colleagues had often instituted a “good sweating” against their competitors by flooding the market and cutting the price. Competitors were forced to make a truce according to the rules of Standard Oil, or, lacking the staying power of Standard Oil, they would be driven out of business or taken over. Circumstances were, of course, wholly different in the mid-1980s; yet they were not so different, after all. Once again, a
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