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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER 31, 1982
PAGE 9
The French, hardly forthcoming about their financial policies at
the best of times, may be reluctant to go into details partly be
cause the French newspapers have unflatteringly described the aid
as a Saudi rescue operation for the battered franc. "The Magi
Saudi King comes to Paris
I
s support in defense of the franc,"
read a headline in the daily financial newspaper, LES ECHOS. In
discussing the "Franco-Saudi entente cordiale," the paper then
posed the most troublesome question:
"What is the exact
price?..• "
The French bleakly view the loans as "proof of the growing weak
ness of the franc and our growing dependency on Arab money," says
Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute of
International Relations, a nongovernment organization. The ques
tion posed by France
I
s new financial link to Saudi Arabia is
whether it foreshadows a major change in France's Mideast policy.
The French economy is increasingly in deficit, observes Mr.
Moisi, and Saudi Arabia is still France's largest oil supplier.
"Can France have an independent policy in the Middle East when
it's dependent on Arab money?" he asks.
Overall, the world is heading into what a famous sports announcer in Los
Angeles would call "nervous time." John G. Heimann, formerly a top banking
regulator as U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, said the world may be "on the
lip of a whirlpool" where a decline in international trade "is sucking down
the world system." Heimann believes that policymakers in Western countries
will be compelled to stimulate world growth, preferring renewed inflation
to the prospect of a worldwide vortex.
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau