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carrying a card in his wallet or purse for 6-8 months before finally
getting around to mailing it.
With the planned sale of Quest magazine we are poised to hand over
production to the new owners. We don't anticipate great staff lay
offs in the pre-press area because of the planned increase in Plain
Truth size and worldwide booklet production. Mr. Stan Rader recently
wrote me a memo complimenting the staff on their fine work for the
AICF publications. Whatever our personal feelings are about the
magazine, we cannot downgrade the production quality which, by the
way, is now used as a standard in the Publishing industry. The major
credit for this reproduction quality goes largely to our production
people here in Pasadena.
--Roger G. Lippross, Publishing Services
ON THE WORLD SCENE
BOMBSHELL ANNOUNCEMENT FROM BREMEN, WEST GERMANY On the eve of the
seven nation economic summit conference in Bonn this coming weekend,
the leading Common Market powers -- West Germany and France -- have
come up with a startlingly ambitious plan.·
Meeting July 6 and 7 in Bremen, West Germany, the nine Common Market
countries agreed to set up by the end of the year a system to stabilize
European currencies by cutting down speculation
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on the dollar and on
European currencies themselves.
And they will create a European Currency Unit (ECU) which will be
freely interchangeable among Common Market countries at a fixed rate.
Under the plan, drawn up by West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt
and French President Valery Giscard d' Estaing, each nation would
put 20% of its dollar and gold reserves plus a matching amount in its
own currency into a central fund. Then, when speculators tried to
buy or sell dollars on European currencies, the Common Market could
make such transactions unprofitable by making counteroffers with a
portion of the anywhere from the $25 billion to $50 billion available
behind the new reserve unit. (This ECU, at least at the outset, would
not be a separate currency as such, but an artificial accounting unit,
similar to IMF special drawing rights, or SDR'S.)
Progress toward creation of this fund was made at the last EC summit
in Copenhagen in April (and reported a few weeks ago in this column
in the Pastor's Report. ) However, no one expected so much progress
to be made on the scheme so quickly. As Dan Cook, the Los Angeles
Times reporter noted: "The agreement to create a new monetary system,
which was the great achievement of this meeting, goes much further
than has been expected, a great deal more rapidly than had been
thought possible."
The ECU plan is still in the planning stage. It will be further
refined at a July 24 EC finance ministers' conference. The framework
for the new system is expected to be completed by the end of October,
with final presentation to the EC heads of government at their next
semi-annual conference in Brussels in early December.