Word: spiralling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Steve Nicholas remembers when he first learned how to throw a football at age live. Virtually every American recall his initial attempts to spiral the pigskin to a supportive father in the backyard or neighborhood park on a crisp autumn afternoon...
...both sides increased their nuclear firepower by several orders of magnitude. It was a classic vicious spiral. Neither nation wanted to be on the losing side of an overkill gap. Wildly excessive, not to mention expensive, programs were justified on both sides in the interests of preserving a "balance of terror." Nonetheless, the nightmare of actual war receded somewhat into the subconscious of civilization. Partly because of the scare that Kennedy and Khrushchev had given the world over Cuba, the U.S. and the Soviet Union buckled down to the serious pursuit of agreements that would diminish the chances of nuclear...
...remembered for, the presidency of Ronald Reagan has already been firmly linked with one happy economic achievement: the start of the wind-down of the longest sustained inflationary surge in the nation's history. A year ago, the woozy U.S. economy was wobbling atop a seemingly endless inflationary spiral, traumatizing families everywhere with the vision of a lifetime of work and savings being eroded to nothing by the whirlwind of runaway prices...
...Nothing did more to propel inflation ever higher during the 1970s than the success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in raising the benchmark price of a barrel of crude from $1.80 in 1970 to $34 now. Besides the skyrocketing increases in retail prices of gasoline, the spiral helped drive up everything from apartment rents, which are affected by fuel costs, to the price of food, which is hauled to supermarkets in diesel-burning trucks...
Eventually, however, the petro-price spiral reached the point at which consumers and industry worldwide simply would not, or even could not, pay any more. Prompted by recession, they cut back on usage so sharply that the world is now awash in surplus oil, and prices are coming down. When lines form at gasoline stations these days, it is not because of shortages but because prices have dropped-below $1 per gal. in Texas...