Word: baseler
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...mechanisms that have developed since 1949. Keeping those mechanisms oiled and balanced is the task of the international banking community's senior members, who are usually referred to as The Club. The Club works with the International Monetary Fund in Washington and the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, the official bankers to countries...
Among the world's temples of high finance, none has risen to such eminence in such an unpretentious way as the Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements. Its five-story, stone-faced headquarters, sandwiched between a tourist agency and a watch shop across from the railway station in Basel, still looks like the second-class hotel it once was. Travelers who often enter its musty lobby hoping to change their money find neither tellers nor vaults nor any cash at all. The B.I.S. keeps elsewhere its $1 billion gold hoard and $1.7 billion in other assets...
...depends on trust and teamwork among central bankers. Perhaps more than any other institution, the B.I.S. helps knit such personal ties. In addition to the work sessions last week, there were teas, cocktail parties, receptions and dinners for delegates and their wives-and the traditional gourmet stag lunch at Basel's venerable Schützenhaus restaurant. "The B.I.S.," says Economist Robert Triffin, Yale's famed international monetary expert, "is partly a country club and partly a church-to maintain the dogma of central-bank independence from governments...
Dutch Uncle. B.I.S. directors -among them central-bank governors from Britain, West Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden Switzerland-confer monthly at Basel with emissaries from nonmembers U.S., Canada and Japan. That inner ring forms what financiers have dubbed "the Basel Club": eleven men whose banks control three-quarters of the world's gold and currency reserves. Originally set up in 1930 to handle reparations payments from World War I, the B.I.S. gained stature chiefly after the mid-'50s as European currency controls ended. From the regular meetings in Basel sprang such innovations as currency swaps...
Died. Jean Arp, 78, a leader in abstract art, best known for his egg-smooth sculptures; of a heart attack; in Basel, Switzerland. Born in French-German Alsace, Arp was nourished in both countries-in Munich in 1912 he studied under Kandinsky; in Paris he worked with his friends Picasso and Modigliani. More for fun than anything else, he was a founding father of Dada, the 1916-22 Bronx cheer that razzed tradition and called it art; yet his own, very personal statements were serenely curved marbles and bronzes...