Wealth & Money Quote by Shimon Peres

The most telling word here is "Imagine!" Peres isn’t marveling at sacrifice; he’s signaling how politically radioactive it is to demand it. As a seasoned Israeli statesman speaking from inside the machinery of crisis management, he frames austerity as an almost unbelievable act of public responsibility, then pivots to the other half of the bargain: industry must stop passing pain downstream. It’s a neat rhetorical two-step designed to sell discipline as fairness.

The intent is managerial and moral at once. Peres is trying to make emergency economics sound like a collective national project, not class warfare. By pairing a brutal wage cut with a cost freeze "no matter what the inflation is", he manufactures symmetry: labor bleeds cash now, capital restrains pricing power now. The subtext is that without this balance the social contract snaps. Ask only workers to tighten belts and you invite strikes; ask only industrialists to absorb inflation and you trigger capital flight, shortages, or quiet sabotage. The line performs the tightrope walk in real time.

Context matters: Israel in the 1970s and early 1980s wrestled with punishing inflation and repeated stabilization attempts that depended on wage and price controls, union buy-in (not least from the Histadrut), and credibility with business. Peres’s phrasing aims at that credibility. It implies, without admitting, that normal politics has failed and that only extraordinary coordination can prevent the economy from becoming another front in a country already accustomed to fronts.