Word: lira
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Rome told the story last week without naming the Cardinal concerned. On the afternoon before the crash His Eminence appeared with a cheque for 95,602 lira drawn on the account of His Holiness, and asked for the whole sum in clean, new banknotes, to be used in charitable distribution. Even Dictator Mussolini has not made many Italian banknotes clean. The Cardinal was not surprised when Commendatore Jorio asked him to leave the check (already endorsed) overnight, until the fresh bills required could be scrambled for and sorted out. Hastily, when the august robed figure of His Eminence was gone...
Last week the 150 state banks of Naples wired to Rome, asking that fifty million lira ($2,500,000) be rushed south at once. Throngs of Neapolitans danced and cavorted through the streets, shrieking, delirious with joy. When the cash began to arrive in vanloads, each of the 150 banks became a scene of pandemonium. Once again...
...rotated" (dismissed) Finance Minister Count Volpi and several other most distinguished statesmen (TIME, July 16, 23). "My ministers are rotated," explained Signor Mussolini to his ministers, "when each accomplishes a cycle of fecund activity. . . . The cycle of Count Volpi as Finance Minister was completed with the stabilization of the lira on a basis of gold. ... He has immortalized his name." The new Finance Minister, Senator Antonio Mosconi, a Venetian aristocrat, was next informed that he is expected to immortalize his name rounding out a fecund cycle bounded by Six Points: 1) "Immutable maintainance of the present level of stabilization...
Though such a movement would have seemed trifling before the lira was stabilized on a gold basis, it loomed ominously, last week, almost seven months after complete stabilization was supposed to have been achieved. With Volpi, the master stabilizer out of office, a serious slump might...
...Paris came a second wave of panic rumors-again with repercussions in Manhattan. Fascist censors were suppressing, it was declared, the fact that Italian bankruptcies have risen from 500 per month in 1923 to over 900 per month. Substantial Italian banks with capitalizations of between one and 600 million lira were stated to be going bankrupt at the rate of one such institution every fortnight. Finally bills to a total value of three and a half million lira were declared to have been dishonored during the past twelvemonth in the three provinces of Rome, Milan and Turin...