Word: drachmas
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...even terms with industrial Europe, Greek business has to make seven-league strides. Emerging from the devastating war years, Greece had runaway inflation, scant capital resources and a technically innocent labor force. Since the free-enterprising government of Premier Constantine Karamanlis took office in 1954, it has stabilized the drachma and set Greece on the course toward industrialization. The economy is still lopsidedly agrarian. More than half of the 8,400,000 Greeks scratch out a living on uneconomic fruit, tobacco and cotton farms; 8% of the non-farm labor force is jobless, and 25% of those on the land...
Having won the approval of both the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches for her prospective May marriage to Spain's Prince Juan Carlos, Greece's fetching Princess Sophie, 23, came to grips with Mammon. In an atmosphere of high drachma and low politics, the National Radical Union majority in Greece's Parliament argued-correctly-that the royal family was "not rich" and pushed through over the loud protests of a not-so-loyal opposition a bill granting the princess a dowry...
...that connects Athens and Salonica with hundreds of villages that once were far from the main drag, brought electricity to hundreds of thousands of Greeks who never had known anything but candles, got the shipyards going, and brought strength to the nation's banks. Today Greece's drachma for once commands confidence at home and abroad. Tourists who once chose Italy or France now flock to enjoy the thin sun, sail out to the Aegean islands, and scramble around the magnificent rubble of the Acropolis...
...happens to be loaded with sugar. When Helen commits suicide, Spiro suffers a bad quarter-hour's remorse; it is nothing compared to the remorse he suffers after he marries the millionaire's daughter and discovers that wily old papa has cut the newlyweds off without a drachma...
...early postwar years, Niarchos saw the bright future of international trade and plunged into shipping with every drachma he could scrape together while most shipowners were battening hatches to ride out an expected slump. In ten years. Niarchos has not only built his fleet-and a fortune estimated as high as $350 million-but has helped revolutionize the design, financing and operation of tankers, launching a new race of giant ships that is fast changing the economics of merchant marines the world over...