Word: alarm
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Though the immediate cause of alarm was the Federal Reserve action two weeks ago that forced credit-card issuers to place a sum equal to 15% of new loan money into a noninterest bearing account, the lenders have been suffering pinched profits or even losses for months. Banks in most states are caught in a squeeze between high interest rates and local usury laws. In New York, for example, the maximum interest on credit-card purchases is 18% on an annual basis for the first $500 and 12% on everything above that. But banks are now paying as much...
...recently circled the globe, opening vast new avenues for greed and war. Europe had more mad kings than sane, and the Devil had both the One True Church and the infant Protestant Revolution in the palm of his hand. In Germany, the very ideas that had filled him with alarm, when they'd broken out in Wittenberg, were now the occasion of such dissension and slaughter that it was a mystery to the Devil that he hadn't introduced them himself...
...Jimmy Carter stepped before the television cameras in the East Room of the White House last Friday, his task was not just to proclaim another new anti-inflation program but to calm a national alarm that had begun to border on panic. Inflation and interest rates, both topping 18%, are so far beyond anything that Americans have experienced in peacetime-and so far beyond anything that U.S. financial markets are set up to handle-as to inspire a contagion of fear. Usually confident businessmen and bankers have begun talking of Latin American-style hyperinflation, financial collapse, major bankruptcies, a drastic...
...tempting target, and it attracted some sophisticated thieves. Around midnight, they broke into Miami's Trend-line Jewelry, a large wholesaler of precious metals that also dealt in foreign markets. They knew enough about electronics to thwart a complex alarm system, one that used sonar equipment and electric eyes. They knocked out a second series of alarms that guarded four safes, and then managed to open one and to cut into two others with acetylene torches...
...cries of alarm filled the air last week over the news that inflation had hit 18% per year, the Carter Administration was orchestrating a symphony of its own responses. "We have reached a crisis stage," the President declared. Television crews filmed determined officials, sleeves rolled up and ties loosened, working in normally free hours to cut the budget that Carter himself had sent to Congress only a month earlier. As the week began, Cabinet members slogged through snow-clogged streets to their offices for Sunday meetings to draw up the spending cuts that the President had ordered placed...