Word: frances
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...tenets. Inflation is down to 6.2 percent, but the price, in terms of unemployment and creativity, may have been too high. During his first year in office, Mitterrand tried the "post-1930s" approach. Massive government spending successfully held unemployment in check, but produced soaring inflation and a feeble franc. Mitterrand has since adopted an austerity program to avert catastrophe. The five other nations present at the conference--West Germany, Italy, Canada, Britain and Japan--fall between these extremes, yet none but Japan has avoided economic dislocation. And 22 million people are unemployed in the summit countries...
...continue, they risk causing renewed world recession. The 3 West Europeans, including the Socialist Mitterrand government, also feel aggrieved because they are making rigorous efforts at fiscal austerity. As a percentage of national output, the projected U.S. deficit (6.3% of G.N.P.) is nearly twice as large as those of France, Britain and West Germany, and more than three times as great as Japan's. The rise in value of the U.S. dollar has another adverse effect since the cost of petroleum is denominated in U.S. dollars, meaning that francs, marks and other currencies buy less oil. This year...
...France is the furthest out of sync with other industrial nations. When Mitterrand's Socialist government came to power in 1981, it made the mistake of stimulating the French economy at a time when other nations were fighting inflation. As a result, the value of the franc began to fall, plunging 34% against the dollar during the past two years. That drop made France's imports more costly and thus worsened its inflation, now running at 9%. The French have gone heavily into debt trying to defend the franc in the currency markets, and last week they...
...Moreover, the U.S. promised to redeem all dollars held by foreign governments with gold at the $35-per-oz. price. The value of all other currencies was set in terms of the dollar, and countries were obliged to maintain the value of their currencies. If the French franc suddenly dropped below its assigned price in dollars, for example, the French government had to push the price back up by buying francs on the foreign exchange market...
...state-of-the-craft boat was another matter. Jeantot, who has dreamed of little else but circumnavigating the globe since he was a teenager, sank almost every franc he had saved as a highly paid diver into the $270,000 project. His greatest good fortune may have been to meet Naval Architect Guy Ribadeau-Dumas in 1982. Ribadeau-Dumas, 32, who had already designed successful racers, built several ingenious engineering features into Credit Agricole, notably a seawater ballast system that permits speedy adjustment of the boat's trim...