Word: insist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...effect. But one of his bedrock principles has been that taxes must be steadily reduced as a proportion of national income. Now some of his subordinates are openly declaring that goal to be not only unattainable but undesirable. Treasury Secretary Donald Regan went so far last week as to insist that tax collections must increase from the current 18% of gross national product to 20% by 1986 if deficits are ever to be tamed...
...month, guerrillas seeking to overthrow the Marxist government of neighboring Mozambique blew up a pipeline that fed essential supplies of oil to Zimbabwe from the Mozambican port city of Beira. As a result, streets and highways in Zimbabwe are now largely deserted, many workers stay home, and motorists who insist on filling up must wait for as long as 24 hours for a turn at the pump. Even nature seems to have conspired against the country: much of Zimbabwe is parched from the worst drought in a decade, crippling agriculture, which accounts for 16% of the country's gross...
Forecasters naturally disagree with that. Although they admit to making errors, they insist there is no glitch in their complex economic models. Data Resources Inc., for example, was one of dozens of outfits that failed to anticipate the sharpness of the recession. But Allen Sinai, senior vice president of the big Massachusetts firm, attributes that shortcoming to factors that range from unexpected Federal Reserve shifts to a misreading of the role of foreign trade. In any event, says Sinai, DRI usually assigns its forecasts no more than a 50%-to-55% probability of being right. Adds he: "Clients who have...
...their calmer moments, those involved insist that no such grim scenario will ever come to pass, that the unthinkable will not be allowed to happen, that the debt bomb cannot explode. But it is a fact that for the past 21 months, particularly through a nerve-racking autumn and winter, the bomb's fuse has been sputtering, forcing almost overnight major changes in international lending. Ever since March 1981, when Poland, with a debt of $27 billion, declared that it simply did not have the $2.5 billion due its creditors that year, the danger signals have been flying. Last...
Perhaps with that in mind, most lenders try hard to play down the problems and insist that talk of default, let alone bankruptcies, is ill founded. "Foreigners have been borrowing our money since 1902, when we opened our first [overseas] branch in Shanghai." Citicorp Chairman Walter Wriston told TIME. "Our loan losses overseas are not a third of what they are from those good people who borrow our money and speak our language. There are few recorded instances in history of governments, any government, actually getting out of debt. Countries do not fail to exist." The rescheduling of Mexico...