Word: wheelbarrowfuls
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When war strikes, Michael K flees burned-out Cape Town on foot, wheeling his sick mother Anna in an improvised wheelbarrow. Their ordeal is infernal. Hounded by the police and by thieves, the pair get as far as a hospital, where Anna dies. Michael K is stripped of his money; all he has left is a cardboard box filled with his mother's ashes. Undeterred, he moves on to the place of his dreams, the abandoned farm on the arid South African tablelands of the Karoo, where his mother was born. There he scatters Anna's ashes...
Begun eventually found a job--pushing a wheelbarrow at a construction site. But nevertheless, one day a K.G.B. agent came to his home, arrested and imprisoned him without filing charges. Although he was released a week later, when he returned to work he learned he had been fired. The reason: he had skipped a week of work. Begun explained that he had been in jail, but his supervisor demanded written confirmation. The administration at the jailhouse refused to write such a note, saying that there was no evidence to support Begun's claim. It was back to square...
Even as the self-management resolution was being passed, workers at the huge Katowice steelworks in the south voted that the state-appointed plant manager should be sacked and "carted off in a wheelbarrow" for suppressing publication of the local Solidarity newsletter. The government contemptuously refused to comply, and it was unclear what actions the workers might take to enforce the vote...
...very premature. The alltime inflation record holder is 1946 Hungary, which issued 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengo bills worth about $10. Before World War II, a pengo had been worth 200. Germany between World Wars I and II suffered 4 trillion percent inflation, and Germans pushing wheelbarrows of money often valued the wheelbarrow more highly than all the currency inside'. Currently the top inflation rates prevail in Israel, Argentina and Brazil...
...relatively low price per ounce attracts speculators. The popularity of such tangible assets reflects a fast-deepening distrust of all paper currencies in a period of scary inflation. For some extreme pessimists, the phenomenon has raised the specter of the Weimar era in Germany in the early 1920s, when wheelbarrow loads of notes were needed to buy a loaf of bread. Essentially, the price of gold is an index of anxiety and a barometer of fears that, justified or not, seem too real to many...