Word: dollar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...will Carter's measures work? Only if he holds to them even when the results begin to turn unpleasant. The clearest reaction among economists, bankers and businessmen in the U.S. and Europe last week was that borrowing to defend the dollar would "buy time" to tackle inflation and the trade deficit. That is no insignificant gain; until the mad dollar-selling orgy was stopped, no economic policy of any kind had a chance of succeeding. The Administration has now shown speculators that the dollar can go up as well as down, and the boldest seller will think twice about fighting...
Europeans were quick to point out, though, that last week's rebound of the dollar did no more than restore it to its extremely low levels of three weeks ago; it still takes an even dollar, converted into Swiss francs, to buy a cup of coffee in Zurich. Washington has intervened in the exchange markets before and set off momentary dollar rallies, but it has never bought enough bucks for a long enough time to have any lasting effect. And even $30 billion is not much when measured against the $600 billion or more in greenbacks that are floating around...
...chosen one official to coordinate economic policy. Treasury Secretaries like Henry Fowler (1965-68) and George Shultz (1972-74) have often exercised such a role in the past, but Blumenthal has never achieved that stature or authority. Blumenthal deserves some criticism; in addition to his early waffling on the dollar, he badly misread the state of the economy last January. On the other hand, he has been the target of sniping from the White House staff ever since they got the idea he was putting the knife into Bert Lance. Besides, Carter prefers to decide everything himself, listening first...
...confusion continued last week. Even as the President was announcing the program that the financial markets had been waiting to hear, some Administration officials most unwisely expressed hope that dollar-buying intervention on the currency exchanges would be necessary only for six months or so; fortunately, nobody noticed much. Kahn, on a TV interview show, was asked whether he would support mandatory wage-price controls if necessary to avoid a recession. He said he would, contradicting a year of Administration insistence that it would never consider controls in a situation short of war or a comparable national emergency. By week...
...potential benefit to ghetto youths, and organized labor, which already is very unhappy with Carter. Last week AFL-CIO President George Meany denounced the Stage II wage-price guidelines as unfair and demanded a special session of Congress to establish mandatory controls. He also took a swing at the dollar-rescue program, contending that higher interest rates would hurt workers. The President's cold response, delivered by telephone to a forum in St. Louis: "We got about as much cooperation from Mr. Meany as we had expected...