Word: central
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Western world owes an immense debt to its close-knit fraternity of central bankers. Within the space of eleven months, their informal collaboration has overcome the turmoil of British devaluation, an upheaval in France and a stampede for gold that culminated in the worst international money crisis since the 1930s. A serious slip at any crucial point along the line could have wrecked the wobbly system of international finance, bringing wholesale currency devaluations and economic chaos. Last week the bankers tried to stave off another incipient crisis almost before the world realized that there was one brewing...
...gold by creating today's two-price system. Under that arrangement, the historic $35-per-oz. price continues for official transactions among nations; for speculators, hoarders and industrial users, the price was freed to find its own level in the marketplace. To make the system work, the central banks agreed to buy no newly mined metal. They also agreed to sell no gold whatever to any country that might then succumb to the profitable temptation to unload official gold reserves in the free market, where the price has hovered around...
...conversational tone and decked out with the trappings of an international suspense tale, runs the risk of seeming schematic or frivolous. He produces a rich victim of Nazi terror who, it turns out, may not be dead after all. The story deals in breathless comings and goings across the Central Europe of today and yesterday-yesterday in this case being 1939, just before Hitler's "final solution" was set in motion. Davidson detours into the painfully recollected and infinitely poignant shifts of law and finance that were used to raise the money necessary for getting Jews out of Germany...
Woozy Notion. To this the author adds three central characters-a German, an Englishman, a German-born Israeli-all lawyers assigned to the case. At first, they seem to invite a formal, wooden trialogue that might be entitled "stances to be taken when confronted by the enormities of the past." The German protects himself from guilt by evolving a woozy, romantic notion of national change and renewal. Today's "good, decent people," he reflects hazily, could no longer be "the same people who had performed the actions . . . the horrifying things they had." The Englishman avoids large moral judgments, clinging...
...William Joyce, the chief clerk, is starting back over the resolutions that each caucus has offered to see if there are changes to be made. East Cambridge passes. The Central Four-Model Cities Area, with its complement of student radicals, moves that the East Cambridge resolutions condemning the "growth" of the Universities be changed to read "expansion." The clerk is confused as to what the change is, whether it is acceptable to East Cambridge or indeed whether it has not been adopted already...