Word: pinay
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Premier Antoine Pinay, a resolutely ordinary Frenchman, likes to think of France as a large-scale model of Saint-Chamond (pop. 15,000), his industrious little home town (its chief product: shoelaces) near Lyons. As often as he can, Pinay locks his desk in the Hotel Matignon, his official Paris residence, and slips away to look over the prosperous tannery he still owns in Saint-Chamond, and to chat with local shopkeepers and housewives about the problem on whose solution he has staked his political future: how to cut prices, hold back inflation. Recently, le petit Premier made a startling...
Last week, in the magazine Realties, Pinay reported on some experiments, conducted by a staff of economists, which confirmed his own findings at Saint-Chamond...
...long as they stick to such spendthrift habits, concluded Pinay, France should not expect the government to perform price-cutting miracles. "Ever since Henry IV,* all governments have broken their teeth on this problem [of prices]. The only solution would be an abundance of goods and the restoration of free competition. But things are not that simple, because the customer does not know how to defend himself. On the contrary, he favors high prices...
...billion. Parisian hotheads leaked stories to the papers alleging that unless the U.S. paid up, France would 1) go bankrupt and possibly Communist, 2) pull out of Indo-China, 3) forbid German rearmament, 4) haul the U.S. before the NATO Council for welshing on its obligations. Premier Antoine Pinay fumed Gallicly because his budget, which he had promised to balance without increasing taxes, had been worked out on the assumption that the U.S. would fork over. Pinay sent French Ambassador Henri Bonnet to the State Department with an indignant protest. Said Bonnet afterwards: "The two governments...
...Pinay, in his own quiet way, went on proving that France's confidence is well placed. Last week, when France's No. 1 political pressure group, the peasant-farmer bloc, demanded an increase in the price of wheat, he bravely said no. If bread prices rise, he argued, the whole delicate mechanism controlling the cost of living will break down. Price hikes mean wage boosts, and France can afford neither. It was the first time since World War II that a French Premier has faced down the farmers-a rare act of political courage...