Word: lira
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Washington, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns announced bravely, "As far as I'm concerned, this is the last devaluation." Many speculators clearly did not believe him. Bursts of late selling drove the dollar's price down against the Swiss franc, Dutch guilder and Italian lira. Through Wednesday, the West German Bundesbank found enough buyers of dollars to unload some $950 million of the $6 billion in unwanted greenbacks that it had been forced to buy just before the devaluation, but on Friday it had to buy dollars again to support the price...
...down like acrobats on a trampoline. Since late 1971, for instance, the British pound has risen from $2.49 to $2.64, sunk to an all-time low of $2.32, and last week closed at $2.44. Five important currencies -the pound, Japanese yen, Canadian dollar, Swiss franc and Italian lira-are "floating" with no fixed exchange rate at all. They sell at prices set mostly by supply and demand. That arrangement creates new uncertainty for importers, exporters, investors and tourists, who never know exactly how many dollars will be needed to buy any of these currencies tomorrow...
...latest trouble began building in late January with a minor event: Italy set new exchange rules for the lira. Fearing that the value of their money would drop, many Italians sold lire for dollars, then exchanged the dollars for Swiss francs. The inflow of dollars panicked Swiss authorities, who stopped buying up the greenbacks; the dollar's price in Swiss francs dropped 7%. That did it. Bankers, Arab oil sheiks and treasurers of multinational corporations feared that the U.S. currency would fall against the German mark and the Japanese yen as well; they unloaded their dollars in staggering quantities...
...More. A more fundamental question is whether the dollar really can be treated no differently from the franc, mark, yen or lira. The dollar can no longer be the sun around which the entire monetary system revolves because the U.S. has lost the overwhelming financial dominance that it enjoyed in the 1940s, when the old system was created. But the American economy is still strong enough to make the dollar at least first among equals...
...meticulous, stoop-shouldered Andreotti, however, had other ideas, because Italy is stumbling deeper into a recessionary quagmire of unproductive wage increases, rising unemployment, diminishing corporate profits and pressures on the lira. Before Parliament adjourns for the beach next week, Andreotti expects action on part of his long legislative program. He wants to provide industry with tax relief now and to unfreeze some of the $ 18 billion for public spending that has already been approved by Parliament but is tied up in Italy's strangling bureaucracy. That would give him the political momentum to rule confidently by decree during...