Word: pinay
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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...
Line of Mercury. Pinay had a good talking point, but he would need results, not arguments, to convince the National Assembly, which reconvenes next month, that his government can keep its promise to balance the French budget without raising taxes. At first, Pinay did remarkably well (TIME, April 21 et seq.), but by last week his "save-the-franc" campaign had fallen afoul of man and nature. Foot-and-mouth disease, raging in central France, had ravaged cattle herds, sent beef and veal prices soaring. A hot, rainless summer reduced butter and cheese production, ripened a grape harvest so abundant...
...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...