Word: dollarization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Seventy years ago, race-car drivers like the legendary Barney Oldfield used a simple method to bring their cars to the track: they drove them there. No more. Today's million-dollar race cars are hauled around in souped-up trailers equipped with elevator platforms for loading, fully outfitted machine shops, wood-paneled meeting rooms, stereos and videocassette recorders. Says former racer Bruce Canepa: "Race-car trailers are an art form in themselves...
Call it the million-dollar panty raid. An unknown number of prurient perpetrators broke into the Los Angeles warehouse of Playboy magazine and swiped some of the Playboy empire's most valuable assets: namely, 421 hours of unedited videotape footage displaying Hugh Hefner's Playmates cavorting for the cameras. Valued at more than $1 million, the tapes constitute the raw material for such soft-porn piffle as erotic movies on the Playboy cable-TV channel and videocassette centerfolds. They included vintage rushes of Sondra Theodore, Miss July 1977 and a former Hefner girlfriend, interviews with Jessica Hahn...
There it went again: up, up and away. As fidgety governments struggled with little success to halt the trend, the U.S. dollar took off last week on the sharpest rally since it surged to record heights against major currencies in 1985. The frenzied rise -- which brought the greenback's gain against the West German mark and the Japanese yen to 12.5% so far this year -- raised disturbing doubts about the ability of the U.S. and its major trading partners to keep exchange rates under control. "This is a runaway freight train," said Jay Goldinger, a Los Angeles-based trader. "Anyone...
...rally surprised experts, most of whom had expected the dollar to drift lower this year. Their best explanation: a combination of high U.S. interest rates, which make the dollar attractive to foreign investors, and the political woes of West Germany and Japan. The Japanese have yet to pick a successor to Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, who announced his resignation in April over a stock scandal; in West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrat Union has lost two important local elections this year. Moreover, even though the yield on such securities as ten-year U.S. Treasury bonds has slipped from...
...week's end traders pushed the dollar to a 2 1/2-year high of 1.977 West German marks. That pierced the 1.90-mark ceiling that the U.S. and its trading partners reportedly agreed to in a 1987 accord. In Tokyo the dollar's high reached 139.88 yen, its loftiest level in 16 months and just below the 140-yen ceiling that the allies set. The U.S. and its partners are determined to do what they can to slam on the brakes -- but whether their efforts would slow down the runaway dollar remained an open question...