Word: frenchness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pressure on the mark--and the Keisinger government--for revaluation was great, and most currency speculators became convinced that the Germans would revalue. Hence the rush to convert holdings into marks before the price of the mark went up. And, of course, French financiers and speculators, fearful of the return of the economic chaos that had characterized the Fourth Republic, were the largest buyers. Because lack of confidence in a currency, like a run on a bank or American foreign policy, moves inexorably toward confirming its premises, they seemed likely to be proven correct...
...traced directly to the May upheaval. It brought about a major outflow of gold, and the large pay increases demanded--and received--were the immediate cause of a cost increase bound to weaken France's international trade position. That line of reasoning can easily conclude in an indictment of French students and workers...
...decision to grant massive wage increases, without applying pressure on French businessmen sufficient to keep prices reasonably stable, was political cowardice. The French government should have taken the steps necessary to insure that an increase in wages would result in a roughly equal increase in real income to labor. Or conversely, it should have had the guts to deal with labor, admitting that it lacked either the power or the resolve to curb French business, and refuse to peddle an illusion. Selling the illusion of an increase in income to French labor may have bought DeGaulle political elbow room...
...into marks. That pressure could have been relieved by a prompt revaluation of the mark, but the Germans played coy with the money markets, issuing occasional pronouncements to the general effect that everyone should ignore the speculation and it would finally go away. They knew it was costing the French $800 million in gold per day to maintain the parity of the franc--and they loved...
...Water Hole in the heart of Death Valley (the casualty rate approaching Stroheim's for Greed, the most famous horror story of Death Valley's filming), suggest strongly that the first American film-makers willingly demanded a verisimilitude unknown to most of today's artists. Brownlow quotes the great French director Abel Gance (La Roue, Napoleon...