Word: shekel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plan calls for deep budget cuts, lower wages and sharply higher prices for food, education and health care. At the same time the shekel has been devalued by 13%. The measures, approved by the Cabinet last week, drew acrimonious opposition from the Histadrut labor federation and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. So vociferous was the army in protesting a proposed $193 million cut in the military budget that Peres ultimately agreed to trim only about $66 million...
...marathon 20-hour Cabinet meeting early last week, Peres forced through a package of austerity measures designed to shock the economy back to health. The program included an 18.8% devaluation of the shekel (which beforehand was worth 1,262 to the U.S. dollar) and a three-month general wage and price freeze, along with price increases of 17% to 82% on such subsidized products as gasoline, bread and milk. At the same time, the Cabinet cut away the methods that Israelis use to protect themselves from inflation, by suspending the wage-indexing system that ties earnings to the cost...
...Israel's freshly installed unity government got down to business quickly. At its first Cabinet meeting last week, the coalition of Labor and Likud, the country's two major political groups, decided to cut this year's $23 billion budget by $1 billion and devalue the shekel by 9%. That latter move, which dropped the currency's value from 354 shekels to the U.S. dollar to 397, was meant to stop a run against the currency that was dangerously draining the country's foreign reserves...
...addition, the country has been suffering from a huge trade deficit ($5.1 billion in 1983). Finance Minister Yigal Cohen-Orgad tackled the problem last fall by devaluing the shekel and slicing government expenditures by 6%. That harsh remedy began to work: the trade deficit for the first five months of 1984 was 25% less than for the same period of 1983. Unemployment remains low by Western standards (5.7%), but many Israelis fear that it will continue to rise if measures are taken to cool inflation...
...campaign, Finance Minister Yoram Aridor played what his opponents called "election economics" by cutting excise taxes and import duties on foreign items like autos and color TVs. The Begin government then tried to ease the pain of inflation by broadening indexation and encouraging spending. Losing confidence in the shekel, Israelis increasingly turned to the American greenback. "Our national currency is now the dollar," Ezer Weizman, Begin's former Defense Minister, who is now heading his own ticket, charged last week. "This is a disgrace...