Word: convertibility
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Deeper down, inflation caused some dangerous distortions in the U.S. economy. Consumers and businessmen rushed to borrow, spend and invest, hustling to convert their cash into goods or services before the value of the dol lar declined still further. All this only stoked inflation, and led to an abnormally steep demand that may cause an abrupt contraction on some less lucky tomorrow. As usual, some of the worst victims of inflation were the poor, who had to pay more for everything and lacked either the resources or the sophistication to invest in property or paper with a rising value...
...years Merton had been the most publicly visible Christian contemplative since St. Simeon Stylites took refuge on top of a pillar. Merton's pillar was print, and he had not exactly chosen it for himself. What he had chosen, at the age of 26 and as a new convert to Roman Catholicism, was the silent and anonymous life of the Trappist monks, who rise early, work hard, eat little and pray much. When he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, however, his abbot decreed that Merton should continue writing-as he had since...
...ever disputed that radical views should be presented in the Harvard curriculum," Roger W. Brown, chairman of the department, said after the meeting, "but what is at issue is whether a course should persuade or convert its students--or in this case the community--to its partisan point of view...
...pressure on the mark--and the Keisinger government--for revaluation was great, and most currency speculators became convinced that the Germans would revalue. Hence the rush to convert holdings into marks before the price of the mark went up. And, of course, French financiers and speculators, fearful of the return of the economic chaos that had characterized the Fourth Republic, were the largest buyers. Because lack of confidence in a currency, like a run on a bank or American foreign policy, moves inexorably toward confirming its premises, they seemed likely to be proven correct...
THEN THERE are the Germans. The franc was not the only currency being attacked by speculation; the currencies of many other nations--particularly of the pound--were placed under strain by the desire to convert into marks. That pressure could have been relieved by a prompt revaluation of the mark, but the Germans played coy with the money markets, issuing occasional pronouncements to the general effect that everyone should ignore the speculation and it would finally go away. They knew it was costing the French $800 million in gold per day to maintain the parity of the franc--and they...