Word: mayer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After an all-night session of the Assembly, René Mayer partly appeased the Socialists. He proposed, as a blow at black marketeers, to withdraw all 5,000-franc notes from circulation. The balky Socialists swung into line. The Assembly adjourned...
...were about to perish for lack of air," said Finance Minister Rene Mayer last week. "We had to smash the window with a single blow." Mayer chiefly meant that, without devaluation of the franc (TIME, Feb. 2), French recovery would have been stifled through inability to sell goods abroad. But for a few days last week, Rene Mayer and Premier Robert Schuman had French Socialists at their throats. As advocates of dirigisme (directed economy), Socialists did not like the breeze of free enterprise that threatened to blow through the smashed window...
...Socialists blasted the proposed law to set up a free market in gold. To Premier Schuman and Finance Minister Mayer, the free gold market was the lodestone that would draw hoarded gold and hidden assets from buried iron pots and foreign banks. This in turn would stimulate production and provide a stabilizing base for currency and foreign trade. To the Socialists, the 25% fine to be levied against hoarders was inadequate punishment for unpatriotic speculators...
Except for the assurance that France would try to stop cheapening of the pound, the French went ahead with the" Mayer plan. They pegged the "official franc" at about 214 to the dollar for use in the export-import trade, planned to set up a free market for trading in dollars...
...small shopkeepers, bakers, butchers and barbers, well-larded with party members, were assembled. Duclos, a plump parrot of a man, was on his best behavior, addressing them as "mesdames et messieurs," instead of "comrades." He shrewdly bracketed "Le Plan Marshall" with something his audience hated-"Le Plan Mayer," Finance Minister Rene Mayer's anti-inflation plan, which levies steep taxes on business and industry...