Word: forecaster
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Saturday last week some 5,000,000 Englishmen were playing soccer. Almost 1,000,000 more were watching their favorite professional teams perform. For most of the week, nearly half the population of England, hoping to forecast the results of Saturday's big-league matches, had been nibbling pencils, marking numerals and crosses on little printed slips. Saturday night, three out of four Englishmen were gathered around radios to hear the results of the games. For soccer is the most popular sport in England...
...England's No. 1 pastime from September to May, soccer in the past four years has created a new industry-one of the biggest in the country. Last year ?40,000,000 ($200,000,000) changed hands in British football (soccer) pools-a weekly win, lose or draw forecast of the big-league matches. Started just after the War and nurtured by Depression and the dole, football pools, aided by well-advertised slogans like "You can make a fortune for a penny," have grown each year until today it is reckoned that pool coupons go to three...
What alarmed Parliament were such statistics as these, widely circulated in the British press: From 1934 to 1937 the turnover from football pools rose from ?10,000,000 to ?40,000,000. Mathematical odds against the correct forecast (first prize) are estimated as high as 14,000,000-to-1. Still, there is always that lucky penny that won ?19,000, the sixpence that brought ?30,780. A pool promoter's net profit may run up to ?2,000,000 a season...
...budget, the forecast for receipts was $5,919,000,000, for expenditures $6,869,000,000. Result: a 1939 net deficit of $950,000,000. On the outgo side the President tentatively set down Defense at just under a billion, Relief at just over a billion, then added: "Due to world conditions over which this Nation has no control, I may find it necessary to request additional appropriations for national defense. Furthermore, the economic situation may not improve-and if it does not, I expect the approval of Congress and the public for additional appropriations if they become necessary...
...dictatorship. And then they trot out the old bogey of a third term. . . . Obviously, the President cannot in advance decline a renomination that may never be offered him. Just as obviously, with the world in such a turmoil as it is today outside of this continent, it cannot be forecast whether the American people would permit him to lay down his burden in view of possible eventualities...