Word: lira
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...money exchanges in Rome's Piazza Colonna, the news came as a profound shock. But to Italian exporters, U.S. importers and world traders everywhere, the news was the best out of Italy in months. Last week, the Italian government abandoned the fictitious value it had set on the lira. It devalued the lira from 350 to the U.S. dollar to what it considered its true worth-the last month's average black-market price of 589 to the dollar...
Thanks to the cooperation of the governments concerned, means have Ween found to overcome many of our foreign exchange problems. Until last spring, for instance, Italians could buy TIME on the basis of the French franc (i.e., Italian subscribers and newsstand buyers paid for TIME in lira, which were exchanged for francs and remitted to our Paris office). This worked well until the Italian Government, by importing more from France than it exported, ran out of francs and TIME could no longer clear its Italian lira remittances. At that juncture the Government, expressing its desire to continue having TIME & LIFE...
Operatic Tenor Tito Schipa's ex-wife Antoinette, who lives in Italy, complained that her alimony kept meaning less & less as the lira kept falling. She sued for a little adjustment: $1,000 a month in U.S. money would be about right, she figured...
...year-old process* ended in the Holy City last week, Roman citizens had a field day with the first batch of pilgrims they had seen in years. One old Swiss woman with a strange silver headdress covering her huge bun of white hair got a 100-lira note from a moneychanger in exchange for her 100-Swiss-franc note (worth more than 20,000 lire). Postcard peddlers got rich...
...Italy the departure of U.S. troops had cut the supply of cigarets to the point where a cigaret currency crisis had set in. The value of a carton was as erratic as that of a lira. Enterprising Italians were doing their best to restabilize by "importing" cigarets by mass smuggling...