Word: jacobsson
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...JACOBSSON...
...currency cop of the world is a massively built man (6 ft. 1 in., 220 lbs.) with the shoulders of a riot-squad member and the broad, ranging mind of Sherlock Holmes. His name: Per Jacobsson (pronounced yah-kub-son). His job: managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Jacobsson is an expert at pleading, cajoling, and onoccasion forcing nations to follow wise economic policies. Thanks to the Fund -and booming production in Europe -Jacobsson reported last week that "Europe's monetary troubles have been successfully overcome, from a whole series of emergencies, on to stability, to external convertibility...
Established in 1944 to shore up the currencies of its members, the Monetary Fund long had negligible influence on the world's currencies ; the job of reconstruction needed before currency stabilization proved too big. But by 1956, the year Jacobsson took over, the Fund got its first big chance to show what it could do when Egypt seized the Suez Canal, then blocked oil, food and other vital supplies from Europe, and touched off a disastrous run on the British pound...
...even more heroic rescue was required in 1 958 for France. Weakened by the wars in Algeria and Viet Nam and poor fiscal management, France was close to financial collapse when Jacobsson hustled to the rescue. He arranged a package of $655 million in credit from the Fund, the European Payments Union and the U.S. With the loan went some detailed recommendations on how France could put its fiscal house in order. It did so well that after De Gaulle came to power he was able to devalue and stabilize the franc. At other times, Jacobsson rescued the Danes, Dutch...
Although he spends his time helping to manage the world's currencies, Jacobsson is still at heart an oldfashioned, classical economist who believes in free rather than planned economies. Born in 1894 in the village of Tanumon Sweden's west coast, he studied at the University of Uppsala. Says he: "I got my training in economics before 1914-before economics was turned upside down." He also got a lot of it from doing. From 1920 to 1928 he was a League of Nations economics consultant, trying to make the economies of eastern Europe work. After two years...