Word: france
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...week's end. The Italian lira has lost 18% of its value since January; it now stands at 806 to the dollar, v. 633 only one year ago. Beset by economic troubles, Spain devalued the peseta by 10% last month. There are strong indications that the French franc may also be forced into devaluation...
Crucial Test. Even as the weak grow weaker, the strong currencies become yet stronger (see chart). The value of the Swiss franc, the world's solidest currency, has increased 5% since last September, while the West German mark has risen 3%. The dollar, which had been suffering only two years ago, now has won new respect abroad as Europeans become increasingly impressed with the vigor of the U.S. economic recovery...
Below the Snake. Measured against the pound or lira, the French franc looks strong. Measured against the deutsche mark, it seems weak-mostly because prices are rising more than 31½ times as fast in France (an annual rate of 9.6%) as in Germany. France is a member of the "snake," a group of eight European countries that have pledged to keep currency-exchange rates within a 4.5% range of fluctuation; the franc is trading right at the bottom of that range. Some French industrialists would welcome a devaluation as a means of making French products cheaper abroad, and some...
Irony and Narrative. Next to Miro and Dubuffet, the oldest painter in the show is Jean Helion. Having been one of the leading abstract artists in France between the wars, Helion returned to figuration in 1947. "I looked through my studio window," he recalls, "and I found that the outside world was more beautiful than my picture." He is now 71 and at the height of his powers. What pervades his paintings is a wry and original sense of human stance and gesture; under the cubist planes of the surface lies a marked appetite for the sensuality of commonplace things...
...forces of supply and demand in foreign exchange markets and not, as in the past, by government fiat. The system seemed to work well for a while. Now, however, a growing number of Europeans are concluding that floating rates have been a failure. The harshest critic has been France, which last week ceased to allow the franc to float freely against all other money. Instead, it will rejoin a European fixed-rate scheme known as the snake-that ties the values of seven currencies to each other...