Word: lire
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...gang demanded $ 17 million but finally settled for $2,890,000. To deliver the money, Billionaire Getty, who lives in England, sent to Rome a tall, craggy-faced American, identified by Italian newspapers as Fletcher Chase, 54, of San Diego. Chase packed 52,000 banknotes in lire into three sacks, but not before police had microfilmed each...
...Sacks of Lire. Then, carefully following the kidnapers' instructions, Chase, in a rented car, headed south on the autostrada toward Naples. Just after passing Lagonegro, south of Naples, members of the gang pulled up alongside in a Citroën and pelted Chase's car with pebbles while the men inside rubbed their fingers together as a signal for money. Chase got the message and pulled over to the side. While he was handing over the sacks of lire, a car driven by a Rome detective with a pretty blonde policewoman at his side halted near by. Pretending...
That may answer the public's need for a villain, but it will do little to solve the city's long-range problems. It will cost billions of lire, which Naples clearly does not have, to upgrade the sanitation system. Meanwhile, the city's multitude of hard-core unemployed has been swelled by thousands of jobless fishermen, restaurant workers, peddlers and dockers. All are ripe targets for the violent rhetoric of left-wing and neofascist agitators. The disease may have been contained, but it will be a long time before Naples recovers from a more damaging illness...
...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...
...Common Market ministers did not specify any details for the eventual replacement of francs, marks, guilders and lire by some supranational monetary unit. An alternative might be that the Common Market currencies will continue to exist side by side, with each bank note carrying a printed table of its equivalent value in sister currencies. Already the ministers have agreed that the trading margins of their money will eventually be reduced to zero...