Word: dollarization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...imports have contributed to the biggest cliff-hanger of all, the U.S. foreign-trade deficit. That imbalance between exports and imports, which reached a record $170 billion last year, prompts jitters among foreign moneymen, many of whom feel that too much of their trade surpluses are tied up in dollars and U.S. Treasury securities. Says Economist John Kenneth Galbraith: "The danger is that we have accumulated under the Reagan Administration such enormous overseas obligations that these could, if liquidated, create a very, very nasty run on the dollar and also a nasty collapse of the stock market." Adding...
...trigger such a crash? No one knows precisely. Panics are based largely on mass emotion rather than analysis, and the global economy has become so complex that economists cannot predict with certainty what combination of stresses and strains is required to produce a chain reaction. For example, no particular dollar figure for U.S. indebtedness will suddenly trigger alarm bells. Says David Colander, an economics professor at Middlebury College: "Our $8 trillion debt is almost an irrelevant figure. Technically this economy could support a $30 trillion debt as long as the people believe the economy is still healthy...
...notwithstanding, America's Gulf force has not established its fitness to escort the 11 re-flagged Kuwaiti tankers through the waterway. The cruisers and aircraft carriers Washington has sent were designed for a major war with the Soviets not for guerrilla encounters with Revolutionary Guards in speedboats. The billion-dollar, 500-yard-long ships are fat targets in the narrow Gulf, where WWI-vintage mines have taken a disturbing toll...
...when some menace is allowed to peep through the bonhomie, just as he is worst when he is most folksy. The Woolworth Building, leaning forward as though to resist some invisible gale, with old Frank Woolworth huddled like a crazed alchemist in its tower and a dragon made of dollar bills (the Spirit of Capitalism -- geddit?) waving its creaking neck from the roof, is quite a creation. But either way, one has the sense of an exaggerated rube's-eye view willfully prolonged. It reminds one that however "elitist" economy and wit may seem, vulgarity soon palls. Grooms' work...
Taxpayers now must put up nearly $1 million a month merely to collect on the bad loans--and have paid $31 million in similar efforts during the last three years. According to the Department of Education, it costs between 25 to 45 cents to recover each dollar on which students default...