Word: moneyitis
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...Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game. During the run of this show, LACMA has scheduled a Jean Renoir film festival. You can schedule one at home to decide for yourself who was the greater genius in this family. If it weren't for Dad's Impressionist years, my money would be on Junior...
What's more, the rebel stash had already been stolen by gun-toting bandits performing cashectomies on the good people of Colombia. Rather than committing a crime, Sanabria reasoned, his men were performing a public good. They were cheating the cheaters out of money that would otherwise go toward grenades and guns, making the guerrillas stronger. Rather than being castigated, they ought to be decorated. There was also a sense among the troops that the cash was a serendipitous payoff for years of dangerous duty protecting the homeland. And if that wasn't enough, it was Easter week, the holiest...
Soon, however, the troops began to feel like they were trapped inside a gold mine with no way to extract the bullion. Their stacks of dollars and pesos added up to nothing because there was nothing to buy: no bars, no brothels, no BMW dealerships. "Imagine having so much money and nothing to eat!" said one of the Colombian GIs, Frankistey Giraldo, whose father named him after Frankenstein. When they looked at themselves, they still saw a bunch of hungry, unwashed peasants in the middle of no-man's land. They were fabulously wealthy. Except they weren...
...even in a place where consumer spending never before existed, the rules of the market economy suddenly kicked in. And the explosive growth in the money supply, combined with pent-up demand, led to another economic phenomenon: hyperinflation. Cigarettes sold for as much as one million pesos a pack. A roll of toilet paper cost 100,000 pesos, or $34. Suárez recalled a bidding war that broke out over a transistor radio that finally sold for the equivalent of $12,000. Some of the troops, intent on spending every waking hour looking for money, bought their...
...word crackled over the radio that fresh troops were moving in to replace nouveau-riche grunts. It wasn't exactly mission accomplished. But the soldiers felt giddy all the same. They had penetrated into a rebel rearguard position, outwitted the enemy, and kept themselves alive. Then there was the money. Sure, they had struck out in their search for Keith, Marc and Tom. But referring to the twenty-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills they'd dug up, Suárez pointed out they had already found three gringos: Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Benjamin Franklin...