Word: backed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nobody is apt to look back on the 1970s as the good old days. The economy's most disruptive decade since the Great Depression has borne the stagflation contradiction of no growth amid rampaging inflation, the can't do trauma of receding productivity in the nation that was long the world's cornucopia, the reality of an energy shortage in the land of supposedly boundless resources, and the debauch of a dollar that once was "as good as gold...
...Federal Reserve Board over the years has jumped back and forth capriciously from tightening the nation's money supply in an effort to slow inflation, to running the printing presses full blast when the economy seemed in need of a lift. But its new chairman, Paul Volcker, seems committed to a more consistent and tougher policy. Last week the Fed lifted its discount rate, the amount that it charges for loans to commercial banks, from 10% to a record 10½%, suggesting that even in the face of a business slowdown the board is at last determined to halt the excessive...
...France, Premier Raymond Barre is scrapping much of the policy, which dates back to Louis XIV, that the government should determine the amount of investment and fix prices. Controls on goods from bread to books, from steel to cars, have been freed. State-owned companies, which control more than 25% of France's economy, have been instructed to operate as if they were private enterprises by relying less on subsidies and making a determined effort to turn a profit...
Shagari's pragmatism could spell success for Nigeria's reborn democracy, if he can curb the excesses of his party followers, who finished strongly in races for the federal senate and state assemblies. But it might also spell disaster if he permits the country to fall back into the fractiousness of the past. Says a Western diplomat in Lagos: "A lot of people have their fingers crossed on this...
Groll claims that Bo and Peep decided to have him come out of hiding for a while and tell his story. Consequently he regards his workaday life as temporary. "If I felt they were calling," he says flatly, "I would go back. They're still putting out vibrations and sending me a lot of positive energy." If the call does not come earlier, he expects to meet up with his companions when that rescue spaceship arrives and flies them away to the eternal garden...