Word: stiff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...weeks ago. The vast majority expect conditions to deteriorate: 66% anticipate rising unemployment, 75% foresee higher interest rates, and 86% believe inflation will increase. They have good reason for gloom, beyond the tendency for such fears to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Big oil-price increases act like a stiff tax increase, pulling money out of consumers' pockets and reducing their ability to buy other products. A rule of thumb is that an annual increase of $8 per bbl. in oil prices reduces economic growth 1 percentage point a year. But petroleum has already risen more than that, and subtracting...
East Germany's Defense Minister announced that his country's soldiers will no longer march the goose step -- the swinging, stiff-legged gait that originated in Prussia and later became a feared and hated trademark of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich...
...recess, and the boys head to the courtyard to perform a drill. Three of them, carrying Kalashnikovs carved of wood, step across imaginary mines, break into an enemy post and surround two "Russian" prisoners. The boys act out the taking and holding of the prisoners, the blindfolding and the stiff parade back to the base. What happens next to the prisoners is not acted...
More important, Bush and Gorbachev are men of totally different upbringing, education, habits and turn of mind. Bush loves sports and entertaining friends. Gorbachev is far more formal. Says one U.S. official who studies him closely: "He's not at all stiff, and he's able to make an occasional wisecrack, but he rarely takes his jacket off or puts his feet up." When Ronald Reagan told his patented funny stories, says one American who attended their summits, "Gorbachev would roll his eyes, and you could see him thinking 'Oh, no, not another story!' " The Soviet President enjoys discussing...
...main source of international venture capital. The patrimony of overseas assets thus accumulated went to pay the costs of fighting two world wars. By 1945, Britain was, in international terms, broke. Deprived of its underpinning of foreign assets, sterling became a wobbly currency, held precariously upright by a stiff corset of exchange controls. As late as 20 years after the war, Britons were forbidden to take more than (pounds)50 out of the country. Direct investment overseas required special dispensation from the Bank of England; portfolio investment was virtually banned...