Word: 1920s
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Several chronic infirmities afflicted the international economic order in the 1920s: the massive destruction World War I inflicted on key economies like those of Britain, France and Germany, and the lingering distortions in trade, capital flows and exchange rates occasioned by the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Memories of the war's bitter fighting and vengeful conclusion had rendered the international atmosphere toxic, making a mockery out of the one transnational institution to have emerged from the conflict, the League of Nations. Adding to those abundant ills was the near religious faith in the sacred orthodoxies of laissez-faire...
Government spending at all levels, though fairly stable even as the Depression set in, constituted only about 15% of GDP in the 1920s. Less than one-fifth of that was federal expenditures. "If the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time," said famously taciturn President Calvin Coolidge in one of his more long-winded (and accurate) assessments of the national scene. The Federal Government, in other words, was a kind of 90-lb. weakling in the fight...
CHICAGO Brooks Brothers' diagonal repp tie ($75) has been a best seller since the 1920s...
...from the 1970s, Triptych - In Memory of George Dyer, a shadowy man stands near the landing of a darkened stairwell, turning a tiny key in a lock. That key is surely borrowed from an odd creature doing the same in several of Picasso's seaside pictures from the late 1920s, when he was flirting with Surrealism. Those elastic Picassos, with their biomorphic figures that are part human, part dirigible, part swollen breast or phallus, turned a key in Bacon. They showed him the way to the nightmare distortions of anatomy that he arrived at by the end of World...
...Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street, is directly responsible for our current dire financial plight. Its repeal, argued journalist Robert Kuttner in testimony before Congress last year, enabled "super-banks ... to re-enact the same kinds of structural conflicts of interest that were endemic in the 1920s...