Word: dollars
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...sedate preserve of economists and statesmen. Britain was in a worse position than at any time since war's end, and by last week every plain newspaper reader in Britain and the U.S. knew it, and knew more details than he had ever known before. Britain's dollar reserves had dropped almost to $1.2 billion, dangerously below the safe minimum of $2 billion. In short, Britain was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy; since she acts as banker for the whole sterling area, her plight also meant the danger of panic and dire economic distress from Manchester...
...press sat up and took notice. It was natural that most U.S. papers, from the polite New York Times to the loud-roaring Hearst press, should pointedly recall the $3.75 billion U.S. loan to Britain, which the British had long since run through, and more than a billion dollars worth of ECAid, which had kept the British going so far. It was also natural that the press of a capitalist, free-enterprising democracy should blame Britain's Socialist government and its works (e.g., nationalization of coal and railroads, the billion-dollar-a-year health plan...
...made from the crisis, even suggested the possibility of a quick general election this November. Explained one Labor M.P.: "A bit of American stonewalling, and we would go to the country with a dramatic clarion call to rally round retrenchment and reform rather than knuckle under to the dollar...
...Revolution of Sorts. At the bottom of the crisis was a by now familiar phenomenon-the yawning "dollar gap," i.e., the fact that Britain, like most of the rest of the world, spends more dollars than it earns in the U.S. The British have tried to meet the situation by more production, increased exports, by cutting dollar expenditures, and rigging bilateral trade deals with nondollar countries. The chief trouble (in U.S. eyes) is that the British are poor salesmen, do not adapt their products to what is wanted in the U.S. and have prices which are far too high...
...Canada last week the more optimistic government leaders were certain that Alberta's dilemma would be resolved somehow. For one thing, the problem was closely tied to Canada's dollar-shortage problem: crude-oil imports ($200 million last year) were third on the list of her dollar spending (after coal and industrial machinery). The saving of $200 million would help to meet the dollar deficit. Oil sales in the U.S. would help still more, and Canadians thought that the U.S. would not ignore this fact in its concern for the western world's economic health...