Word: dollarization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Americans have always been eager for travel, that being how they got to the New World in the first place. Yet the current high rate of the dollar means that prosperous American tourists can fly more, see more, do more and buy much more than ever before. The State Department expects to issue 5 million passports this year, 6% more than last year. How long this boom will last is anybody's guess, but for now Americans are simply grabbing their strong dollars and taking...
...attraction. Last year a record 5.6 million Americans flocked there--more than 2 million to Britain alone--and estimates this year run to well over 6 million, some up to 7 million. (By comparison, 33 million Americans crossed the border into Canada in 1984 to spend the falling Canadian dollar; 4 million visited Mexico, where the peso has suffered three big devaluations since 1982; and 5 million frolicked in the Caribbean...
...takes quite a lot of savings on bargain-price champagne, of course, to pay for a ticket on the Concorde (one way New York to London: $2,466). And although the dollar is high, so are the prices of many goods and services aimed at Americans. The Hermes scarf that now costs "only" $70 in Paris was also about $70 three or four years ago, when the dollar was worth 5 francs instead of nearly 10. At $131, the cheapest room at the Plaza-Athenee is a soupcon higher than it was five years ago, although the rate for more...
...more above the advance estimates. An 18th century walnut desk that went unsold at $1,875 last year brought $4,680; a Queen Anne walnut bureau expected to go for $16,800 reached $33,600. Such prices wiped out the savings that American buyers got from the strong dollar, but London prices for decorative furniture are still at least 20% lower than New York...
...tourists in some ways resembles the first postwar invasion of Americans arriving in the 1950s; it is beginning to arouse the same kind of carping among Europeans, some of whom can no longer afford the shopping expeditions to the U.S. that they enjoyed a few years ago when the dollar was very low. Foreign travel to the U.S. has declined 10% since...