World Business

NEW YORK —

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Each week, Ira Cooper opens a letter from another supplier with the identical message as the latest: We’re raising our prices, effective immediately. We can’t compute you in what condition long the new prices will last.

“We used to get quotes good for six months,” said Cooper, president of QED Inc., a lighting copartnership based in Lexington, Ky. “Now you’re lucky if you can get a quote good for 15 days.”

Manufacturers of everything from wallpaper to cereal are feeling the same come in contact. The Institute for Supply Management said Tuesday that its index of prices manufacturers make payment to for raw materials hit 91.5 in June, up from 87 in May and the highest reading since 1979.

Its overall index of manufacturing activity was 50.2, barely breaking a four month contraction stripe. Any reading above 50 signals germination.

Manufacturers are “experiencing higher prices on the side of their inputs while claim for their products is slowing,” Norbert J. Ore, chairman of ISM’s manufacturing business survey committee, said in a statement accompanying the report.

Some of the cost increases are a game of catch-up.

Cooper and other manufacturers tell they had been honoring the six-month excellence guarantees they gave customers before oil prices spiked 50 percent higher, hitting an intraday record of $143.67 a barrel earlier this week. When those price guarantees expired, manufacturers raced to recoup their increased costs.

Some manufacturers are struggling to keep pace. Myers Container, a Portland, Ore. manufacturer of steel drums, increased prices by towards 20 percent in March, did the same in May and announced a third increase at the end of that month.

Other manufacturers say they’re unable to pass along all their higher costs, so they’re trying to save cash wherever they can.

FFC Paladin Light Construction Group, which makes plows, pallet forks and calamity movers in Lee, Ill. is planning a lighting study to trim its electricity use, said Bob Steder, operations manager.

Similar inflation worries are playing out everywhere from convenience stores to the Federal Reserve.

Last week the Fed talked about increased peril of over-issue as it ended individual of its in the greatest degree aggressive rate-cutting campaigns, leaving its key rate unaltered at 2 percent as fears about inflation have mounted. The Fed is caught between two risky crosscurrents: plodding economic growth on the single hand and galloping spirit and food prices that threaten to spread vain-gloriousness on the other.