Word: greenbacker
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Then Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal ticked off a list of drastic measures that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board will take to uphold the greenback. The key moves: 1) raising the federal discount rate by a full point to a record 9.5%, the sharpest jump in 45 years; 2) reducing by $3 billion the funds that U.S. banks have available to lend; 3) amassing $30 billion in foreign currencies, nearly all borrowed, to support dollar prices on foreign exchanges; 4) greatly increasing U.S. sales of gold...
Impressive as the dollar's immediate gains were, the greenback will stabilize in the long run only if Carter and the Fed demonstrate that they will stick to a tight-money policy as long as may be necessary to reduce inflation, which could be several years. Meanwhile, higher interest?New York's Citibank led the parade last week by increasing its prime rate to a numbing 10.75%?will raise the cost of borrowing by businessmen to build factories or buy machinery and by consumers to finance new homes, cars or college educations...
...initial reaction to the speech, and the plan, was far from encouraging. Corporate money managers, bankers and speculators, apparently believing that Stage II is too weak and will not work, sent the dollar plunging. The greenback fell to its lowest exchange rate since World War II against the yen, the deutsche mark, the guilder, the Belgian franc and the Danish and Norwegian crowns. The price of gold, which moves inversely to the dollar, reached a new peak of $233.70 an ounce. "We had not expected much," explained one Zurich foreign-exchange dealer about Carter's plan, "but neither...
...prevent a further fall in the value of the greenback, the U.S. Government, in close cooperation with leading foreign central banks, should step in and buy large quantities of dollars on world markets. This would require assembling a vast war chest of funds to show currency speculators that Washington has the money to back up that policy. Two fast and impressive steps would be increasing sales from the nation's $60 billion gold reserves, as former Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns suggests, and enlarging the so-called swap network of dollar defense funds from $25 billion to $100 billion...
...foreign visitors flocking to the bargain-filled U.S. They are destined to become a familiar part of the American landscape: buying, bargaining, hitchhiking, backpacking, snapping pictures, sampling strange food and occasionally getting ripped off by predators who know they carry a lot of dollars, however devalued. The ailing greenback has at least made America less of a mystery to the rest of the world...