Word: gold
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...financial centers of the world last week, the gold fever spread like the blood-tingling news of a rich new strike. Day after day on the New York Stock Exchange, the cheap stock of a Philippine gold-mining company, Benguet Consolidated Mining Co., was among the heaviest traded. Wall Street's Bache & Co. was busily selling unrefined gold (the only kind that can be legally held in the U.S.) at premium prices ($44 an ounce). In London, South African gold-mining stocks were ones eagerly bought in a falling market...
...this speculative fever had been stirred up by the hope that the U.S. would raise the price of gold, and thereby devalue the dollar. To this, Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder had said no, a thousand times no. He had flatly declared that the U.S. will not change the price of gold, that it has not even considered such a move. Still, the gossip and gabble continued...
Pressure. Most of it came from U.S. gold miners and such big gold-producing nations as Canada and South Africa. Their argument: at the present price of $35 an ounce, gold mining is unprofitable, and production is slumping. Furthermore, it is unfair to hold down the price of gold when all other commodities have risen...
...world's biggest gold buyer, the argument continued, the U.S. should raise its buying price to about $50 an ounce. Failing that, it should declare a free market in gold, i.e., drop the ban against citizens' buying, selling or owning gold, and cancel the requirement that miners sell only to the Federal Government. Producers confidently felt that freeing gold would boost the price, since it is now selling for as high as $70 an ounce in the free gold marts of India, China, France and more than a dozen other nations...
...hike in the official U.S. gold price, went the argument, would give gold-holding nations a windfall profit to ease their dollar deficits. On its part, the U.S. could use the paper profit from its $24.5 billion gold hoard for loans to other nations...