Word: erhards
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...Erhard reacted typically, alternating threats with exhortation. To unions he pleaded for deferment of wage demands, simultaneously made threatening noises about compulsory savings. To employers he talked of production norms and price ceilings. When unemployment topped 1,500,000, he beat off a censure move in the Bundestag by a scant majority. "Your policy," jeered Socialist Erik Nolting, "only makes the rich richer and the poor poorer...
Canny Konrad Adenauer quietly set up a shadow Economics Ministry in his chancellery to take over if Erhard's prophecies flopped. But the professor's exhortations to Germans to wait for lower prices paid off. The inflation threat faded, and the German economy took off on the boom that has yet to end. Shortly after that crisis, Erhard took a hefty bite on his cigar and told a visitor: "Remember all those announcements I made about controls? You know how many I had to put in force? None...
Germans call Erhard "Herr Optimist." Says Erhard: "I'm no optimist, but a realist who knows the capacity of free-market economy...
...from hamble origins. Born Feb. 4, 1897 in the town of Fürth near Nürnberg in Franconia, he was the son of a peasant boy who left his farm to open a dry goods store in town. Badly wounded by a shell at Ypres, Corporal Ludwig Erhard returned home too weak to work in the store. He stayed on at Nürnberg's Commercial College, found his vocation in economics, went on to take his doctor's degree at Frankfurt University under a liberal professor who taught that "free enterprise is the essence...
...next 16 years Erhard helped run a small, city-supported market-research institute in Nürnberg. It was a backwater existence. Evenings Erhard dined heavily on Franconian smoked meat and dumplings, played the piano or took a hand at Doppelkopf (a four-handed card game) with his institute associates. After World War II broke out, local Nazis pressed Erhard to join Hitler's Labor Front. He refused, lost his post and founded an institute of his own. Friends in the German national association of manufacturers got him such jobs as surveying "The Total Headwear Requirements of Bombed...