Word: market
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...their boots could be heard in neutral stock exchanges. Investors in Great Britain and France in a financial panic dumped securities indiscriminately. On July 31, 1914, four days before England declared war, the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors to keep the bottom from dropping out of the market...
Commodity price levels began at once to get out of whack. Countries which had wheat to spare-particularly the U. S., which was blessed with a bumper crop in 1914-suddenly discovered themselves in a strong seller's market, with the price per bushel rising from 85? in July to $1.28 in December. Rye went up; so did lard; so did sugar. But no general inflation of prices occurred immediately. It was as if someone had turned on a strange magnetic current which attracted certain commodities, repelled others...
...Only the end of the War in 1918, plus an exceptionally good harvest, saved the Swiss from famine. But armies eat chocolate, and Swiss chocolate manufacturers did a thriving business, for the Allies saw that they obtained raw materials. Swiss peasants who owned woodlots found they had a good market for fuel. Electric power derived from Swiss waterfalls was sold to both sides for use in making explosives. Meanwhile, the Swiss did a curious broker business. Germany needed French carbide-cyanamide for saltpeter, French bauxite for aluminum; France needed German iron and steel for emergency railroad tracks and barbed wire...
...mere exchange of goods with the Central Powers by the closing of the Dardanelles, approached crisis before she threw in her lot with the Allies. The peasants-a great majority of the population in each country-unable to buy industrial goods, finally ceased to produce crops for the market, practically fell back on subsistence farming...
Argentina's meat and wheat had a war market, but her inability to obtain her customary imports handicapped her industry, and deprived her Government of its chief revenue, customs duties. She had desperately to borrow money and launched on a still-continued effort to become self-sufficient...