Word: pound
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...British have many sterling qualities, but right now sterling is not one of them. Just four months ago the pound was worth $2.02. Last week sterling tumbled no less than four cents against the dollar in a matter of a few hours. It dipped to a historic low of $1.705 before recovering its shaky moorings and closing...
British officials called the fall an "erratic fluctuation." That view may be overly sanguine, but there was indeed no evidence, for the moment at any rate, of a massive flight from sterling. Yet the sudden plunge left no doubt about just how vulnerable the buffeted pound is to the gusts of the marketplace. The slide was touched off when Swiss banks, anticipating new import controls on foreign capital moving into Switzerland, converted sterling into the solid security of Swiss francs. Even this light selling wave was enough to tip the pound into its tailspin. Said one London currency dealer gloomily...
While a cheaper pound lowers the price of British goods in world markets, and thus provides an incentive to lag ging British industry, it also fuels inflation by raising the cost of imported food and raw materials. One official calculation is that each drop of 4% in the ex change rate of sterling adds 1% to domestic inflation, thus threatening the recent improvement (the rate has dropped 6.6 points in the last six months, to an annual pace of 13%). Still, once the spin began, Prime Minister James Callaghan and his Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey had little choice...
...benefit scheme. But Healey turned aside demands from the opposition Conservatives for more sweeping cutbacks with an admonishment that "the most important thing is not to panic and lose our nerve." More accustomed than most finance ministers to the uses of adversity, Healey was plainly counting on the slipping pound to help secure a resounding union vote for continuing voluntary wage restraint...
...DOESN'T TAKE much to begin to understand what Ezra Pound was like. He and Ernest Hemingway were good--if not close--friends, at least up until the mid-1930s. In 1933 Hemingway had written to Pound in Rapallo, Italy to say that it was from Pound that he had learned more about "how to write and how not to write than from any son of a bitch alive." Pound was an unquestionably important influence on literature in the first half of this century. But by 1934 Hemingway's impressions were shifting. Joyce had asked him to come along with...