Word: pound
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...term as Chancellor was less distinguished. Casting himself as a sort of monetary St. George, he led the costly and ultimately unsuccessful struggle to stave off devaluation of the British pound during the first Wilson government in 1967. At the time, one of his Cabinet colleagues complained: "Jim was a pushover for the treasury mandarins. He simply did not have the intellectual equipment to overrule their traditionalist advice." But Callaghan has a shrewd sense of grass-roots opinion, and in the words of one junior minister, he "knows what the ordinary bloke will wear and not wear." He enjoys more...
...first, Wilson's posture was relatively orthodox, especially his stubborn three-year struggle to stave off devaluation of that national totem, the pound. After the failure of that costly effort, Wilson more and more found himself locked in a battle with his party's leftists. Turned out of power in 1970, he began tending his frayed ties with the unions and the Labor left as he watched Tory policies lead to a confrontation with the unions that nearly paralyzed the country. In his election campaign of 1974 he promised to restore labor peace with a "social contract" providing...
...fashioned monetary crisis gripped Europe last week. Currencies wobbled, governments felt threatened, and the carefully worked-out international agreements aimed at keeping exchange rates stable seemed on the verge of collapse. The French franc lost 3.7% of its value against the dollar and the Italian lira 8.6%. The British pound, weakened by confusion surrounding the surprise resignation of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, continued to trade at record low prices. As anxiety began to shake the money of other nations, traders rushed to buy up strong West German marks. That left West German authorities struggling to avert a formal upward revaluation...
...latest trouble, which had been simmering since January, turned worrisome two weeks ago (TIME, March 22), when the lira's drift downward accelerated and the pound fell below the psychologically sensitive $2 mark. The basic cause was economic disarray in Italy and Britain, which have the highest inflation rates among major European countries. The declines immediately made the goods of both countries cheaper in world markets, and moneymen began selling francs in the belief that the French government, which is struggling with a 10% inflation rate, would have to let their value fall to keep French exports competitive...
Following a testy European monetary meeting Monday, an angry French Finance Minister Jean-Pierre Fourcade in effect accused the British of precipitating a crisis. He charged London with deliberately letting the pound drop in order to stimulate exports at the expense of Britain's trading partners-a charge that British Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey denied. Fourcade also made a last-ditch attempt to keep the franc in the so-called European snake -an arrangement that bound France, West Germany, the Benelux countries, Sweden, Norway and Denmark to hold their currencies within a 4.5% range of fluctuation against...