Word: first
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Frenchmen took special pride in paying off $200 million on a debt to the International Monetary Fund ahead of schedule, piled up their first trade surplus with the U.S. in 60 years, and grew so confident that one Belgian banker remarked: "The French no longer have an inferiority complex growing out of their defeat in the war and their economic troubles. In fact, they have just the opposite...
...Japanese had rebuilt their country so fast that they had been able to send $1.2 billion worth of investments overseas (including a Bank of Tokyo branch in Los Angeles), and had become a creditor instead of a debtor nation for the first time in history...
...Australians got the first substantial electric power from their giant Snowy River hydroelectric project, an endeavor so vast that its $1 billion price tag is equal to 20% of the entire national product of ten years ago. Another signal of change: an upsurge in immigration has brought 1,500,000 hard-working "New Australians," mostly from Europe, to back the "Old Australians" in a forced-draft development of their U.S.-sized continent...
...result of its economic strength, many a European nation felt confident enough to lower some of its trade barriers and chop away red tape. The Common Market (West Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) in its first year was such a resounding success that Britain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Sweden and Denmark formed their own Outer Seven trading area to enjoy the benefits of mass markets and freer trade. Said a Common Market official in Brussels: "At the start, the politicians were for European unity, and the businessmen were very skeptical. But now it is the businessmen...
...says that he is just a bit dubious at finding himself in step with the herd. The crystal-ball gazers predict that the national product will jump to a $500 billion rate in the first quarter, race on to $525 billion or better before leveling off at $510 billion and the first half-trillion economy the world has ever known...