Word: pound
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...celebrities actually go to jail for cocaine habits, but Football Players Randy Crowder and Donald Reese of the Miami Dolphins were not so lucky. Arrested in 1977 for trying to sell a pound of coke to undercover police, they were sent to the Dade County stockade for a year. Texas Rangers Pitcher Ferguson Jenkins made headlines with his arrest and conviction last year after Canadian customs officials found cocaine, marijuana and hashish in his suitcase. Although Jenkins' conviction was erased, he was suspended for two weeks by Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Last February, Thomas ("Hollywood") Henderson, a former Dallas...
Behind much of the wanderlust is the strong recovery of the U.S. dollar against most other currencies. So far this year, the U.S. currency has risen 20% against the once proud West German mark, 23% against the battered French franc and 20% against the British pound. Smiled San Francisco Surgeon Roy Carson, boarding a plane to visit relatives in Sweden: "We watched the dollar go down, and now we're watching it come back up again...
...idea that a currency cannot be trusted unless it is backed by gold seems as durable as the metal itself. In the early 19th century, British Economist David Ricardo declared that without the gold standard the then mighty pound sterling would be at the whim of "all the fluctuations to which the ignorance or the interests of the issuers might subject...
Though pure gold coins were first minted by King Croesus of Lydia (modern day western Turkey) in the 6th century B.C., a gold-backed currency is usually traced back to 1717, when Sir Isaac Newton, then Master of the Mint, fixed the value of the pound sterling at about .24 oz. of gold. For the next 200 years, except when it was briefly suspended during the Napoleonic wars, the gold standard made the pound the world's most trusted currency and helped Britain dominate world finance and trade...
...easier to finance its military effort. In 1925 Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, returned the country to the gold standard, believing that such a step would help restore the British Empire to its former preeminence. But he made the mistake of setting the value of the pound at its prewar gold price, which did not take account of high wartime inflation. This was a major cause of the nationwide general strike that virtually immobilized the economy in 1926. Indeed some historians believe that Churchill's decision to return to the gold standard helped trigger the worldwide Great...