Word: gold
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...himself an undergraduate at Harvard almost thirty years ago. "The sweater still fits," he admits, "but I would hesitate to display the numerals. (Class of 1930). Coming from Brockton High School, "where everybody knew everybody," Latham entered the cold, impersonal atmosphere of Harvard during the lingering days of the Gold Coast...
...return to the gold standard would probably have to be accompanied by a price hike in gold to provide more adequate backing for the vast expansion of money and credit in the last few decades. Some economists who do not advocate a return to the gold standard nonetheless want a price hike. They argue that the U.S. has artificially kept gold at a fixed price since 1934, while the prices of the world's goods and services have more than doubled, and that not enough gold has been produced to keep up with the world's economic strides...
...great majority of the world's economists strongly oppose both the gold standard and a price hike. Says a top U.S. Treasury officer: "The full gold standard is oldfashioned, impracticable, a discipline enforced with the lash. The world has moved on without it." In place of that rigid discipline, nations have built up flexible disciplines better suited to control the ups and downs of the complex modern world, such as the International Monetary Fund. Opponents of return to the standard of a quarter of a century ago insist that the U.S. is already as near to a gold standard...
...economists see any reason for making a price hike now. The British Radcliffe Report on monetary policy this year concluded that such an increase is not "immediately necessary or the most hopeful approach to the problem of international liquidity," and the International Monetary Fund has come out against it. Gold-short nations that need the most help would benefit least by the change; the major gains would be made by such big gold producers as Russia and South Africa...
Economists still believe firmly in gold's prime importance as the ultimate financial standard. They consider it psychologically vital to fiscal confidence, useful as a long-term guarantee that countries can meet their bills. But they have long since ceased to regard it as the sole test of a currency's stability. More important in today's world is the health of a nation's economy, the real rise in its national income, the strength of its built-in fiscal controls. Most nations now have learned the heavy price of unsound financial and fiscal policies; they...