Word: pound
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...pound collapse; the show must go on. And so it did, as Queen Elizabeth opened Britain's new $30 million National Theater in London. The star of the official curtain raising: Actor Laurence Olivier, 69, who founded the National Theater Acting Company in 1962, and who appeared onstage to thank "all relevant councils, committees, boards and departments, indeed, Your Majesty's treasury, not to speak of our brother and sister taxpayers." Olivier, who has recently forsaken his own stage career (but not films) after battling a strength sapping muscle disorder, finished his speech by wishing to those...
...story named no source and was instantly and vehemently denied by everybody involved. Nonetheless, it caused the most violent spasm yet in the seemingly endless agonies of the pound. The story, front-paged on Oct. 24 by London's Sunday Times, implied that the U.S. Government and the International Monetary Fund would insist that the British government let the pound sink to $1.50 against the U.S. dollar as a condition for a desperately needed $3.9 billion IMF loan to Britain. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, IMF officials and British Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey all protested...
...that mean that money traders believed the story rather than the denials? Not necessarily: it means that moneymen so distrust the pound's value that they will seize on almost any excuse to dump sterling. Said one banker: "No one who sold sterling believed that the story was true. They sold because they were afraid someone else would believe it." Even the rare bit of good British economic news cannot soothe these jitters. On Oct. 26 the British government reported that unemployment in September shrank by 78,000, to a total of 1,377,110. The news brought...
...root cause of this nervousness is that international investors simply do not believe that the Labor government of Prime Minister James Callaghan can succeed in its economic game plan to save the pound-and the British economy. That plan calls for reducing the British inflation rate, currently 14.3% a year, by moderately cutting public spending and holding the nation's militant trade unions to a "social contract" under which they are supposed to limit wage increases to 4½% a year. The government's hope is to hang on through the winter. By spring, according to its script...
...Falling Pound. The threats to this strategy are numerous. The continuing fall in the pound itself is one; by making British imports more expensive, the latest drop will add about one percentage point to the inflation rate. The unions at some stage could be forced to rebel against the social contract and seek big raises to catch up with inflation. Now a new menace has arisen: the possibility that onerous conditions could be attached to the IMF loan. Talk is circulating through London that the IMF may demand, if not a $1.50 pound, then draconian cuts in social spending...