AUTOMOBILE owners will benefit from the rate war beginning among auto liability insurers. Irked at the big inroads made in their business by such rate-cutting independents as the Allstate Insurance Co. and the Farm Bureau Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. which offer discounts up to 20% on some risks, two big industry groups are ready to cut rates themselves. The plan, already approved by the National Bureau of Casualty Underwriters and the Mutual Insurance Rating Bureau, which together represent more than 200 mutual and stock companies, calls for reclassification of drivers so that the safer ones will save up to 15% of their premiums. But the independents are talking of making new rate cuts of their own.

DODGE and Willys will share a $60.6 million cutback in Army orders for trucks and jeeps next year. Dodge, which has been making $5,000,000 worth of 34-ton trucks and ambulances a month, will have its orders pared down 37% after Jan. 1. Willys, the Army's sole supplier of jeeps, will have its orders trimmed 53%.

EIGHTEEN fancy Southwestern motels, anxious to give motels a better reputation, have banded together into a blue-ribbon trade association, the Master Hosts. Qualifications for membership: year-round air conditioning, tile baths, a swimming pool.

JOHN L. Lewis' Welfare & Retirement Fund is running in the red.

In its last fiscal year, ended in June, the fund handed out a whopping $138.9 million in benefits. But it took in only $130 million in per-ton royalties, despite the additional Wi a ton Lewis won from the operators last October. Result: the fund's unexpended balance shrank from $99.5 million to $92 million. The fund's outlook, as more miners retire and union-mined coal output declines, is dim. There is small hope that a royalty increase will help, since any boost will shift more coal production to non-union mines. Non-union output jumped 5% last year, to 23% of U.S. production.

WITH steel output up 40% in the first seven months of 1953, Great Lakes ore boats are hauling the greatest tonnages since the Mesabi Range opened 61 years ago. U.S. Steel's 64-boat fleet, which racked up its first 4,000,000-ton month in August, is headed for a full-year haul of 29 million tons, 3,000,000 more than in 1951, the peak year.

PACIFIC Intermountain Express Co. (TIME, Jan. 2, 1950) expects to jump from eighth to first place among U.S. truckers if a deal to buy West Coast Fast Freight, Inc. is okayed by the I.C.C. With a combined fleet of more than 3,000 trucks, operating between Chicago and the West Coast, P.I.E. expects the companies' combined gross to hit $45 million this year, $4,600,000 more than the No. 1 U.S. trucker, Associated Transport, Inc., took in last year.

THE Administration, which wants Congress to amend the "Buy American" Act, is working on ways to liberalize it in the meantime. One idea is to lower, by executive order, the 25% differential by which foreign suppliers must underbid U.S. competitors. Another is to relax the methods of calculating the differential to give foreign suppliers a better break, and to get Government agencies to standardize the rules and conditions they set for foreign bidders.

SOME of the magic is going out of the "miracle" synthetic fibers, particularly those which are supposed to resemble wool. Sales of Acrilan are so slow that Chemstrand Corp. has cut output at its new $30 million Decatur (Ala.) plant to 17% of capacity, laid off all but a handful of workers. Du Font's Orion is not selling well either for use in worsted fabrics. Weavers, disillusioned about the extravagant billings of man-made fibers, are cutting their orders.

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