Word: polisher
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nonetheless, American banks are not Poland's leading creditors. That dubious distinction goes to West German financial institutions, which are owed at least $2.7 billion. The largest single lender is the Bank für Gemeinwirtschaft, with a total of about $310 million in Polish credits outstanding, followed by three other German banks with $180 million or more each. Hans Friderichs, Dresdner Bank's chairman, recently conceded that his bank was setting up a contingency fund against the possible write-off of part of its Polish and other weak loans...
Poland has been on the brink of defaulting on its loans for almost a year. During the summer and fall, private bankers and Polish authorities negotiated a program to give Warsaw more time to pay off its debts. In an agreement reached in November, the Western bankers said that they would give the Poles an additional seven years to repay $2.4 billion that was due this year...
Although Communist governments have traditionally been some of the best credit risks in banking, a Polish default would change views about all future East European loans. Warned a leading West German banker last week: "The Soviets must know the dangers of not financing the Poles. It will be cheaper for them in the long run to do it because if they don't support Poland now, they and the entire East bloc will have to pay a lot more for all their credit...
...bankers maintain that both the East Europeans and the Soviets are dependent upon them for badly needed loans to finance projects like the new $15 billion Siberian natural gas pipeline. Thus, many European and American moneymen believe that the Soviets will eventually be forced to help pay off the Polish debt in order to keep their own lines of credit open in the West. Bankers have nicknamed this hypothesis of a Soviet financial bailout of Poland the "umbrella theory...
These nine stories were left out of The Star Diaries (1976), an English translation of a 1971 Polish collection by Author Stanislaw Lem. The fact that this new book has thus tumbled out of a time warp seems entirely appropriate to its contents. More so, in fact, than the rather misleading title. Lem is not concerned here with rockets or star treks; only two stories take Ijon Tichy, the peripatetic hero and chronicler of The Star Diaries, away from planet Earth. The space that is traveled is chiefly cranial; vast internal distances are covered by leaps of imagination...