Word: argument
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...What I have seen is that government insurance programs are high-risk," said Lockhart. "It is often difficult in a political environment to calculate or charge an actuarially fair price." It is essentially a moral-hazard argument. Lockhart believes that the government will never be able to accurately price the guarantees that Fannie and Freddie offer mortgage lenders and investors. And as long as the government is offering that insurance too cheap, banks will be encouraged to make loans they shouldn't. And that will lead to more losses for Fannie and Freddie down the road...
...votes were counted. The Guardian Council has, after all, ordered a partial recount (meaning that they're going to recount ballots only from voting stations contested by the losing candidates). And obviously, there are hundreds of thousands of people willing to take to the streets to rebut their argument. Still, a timely reminder that nothing is simple in the current political showdown in Iran. - Tony Karon...
Four years ago, during a similarly sultry Tehran summer, I had an argument with Shirin Ebadi about whether Iranians should vote in their country's presidential elections. The human-rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate believed that Iranians should boycott the vote. She argued coolly that people's participation lent legitimacy to an undemocratic regime's flawed electoral process. At the time, I found her view frustratingly staid, the stance of someone who had lost touch with young people's immediate concerns. I felt that boycotting elections made a prize of abstract ideals over daily realities. I had experienced...
...into stocks in March 1969, with dividends reinvested over the years, was worth $280 after 40 years. But bonds did even better ($1 to $294). Siegel, who has debated Arnott on CNBC and elsewhere, sees this as evidence that bonds are now too expensive rather than an argument against stocks--and Arnott doesn't entirely disagree. "I'd hate to have people read that and construe that bonds will win over the next 40 years," he says...
...Boston University finance professor Zvi Bodie, another frequent debating partner of Siegel's, this entire discussion is beside the point for most Americans. "He could be right," he says of Siegel's argument that stocks are a good deal right now. "I'm just more risk-averse than he is." Bodie, co-author of the perennially best-selling business-school textbook Investments, wrote a 2003 book titled Worry-Free Investing and has been trying ever since to steer personal-finance advice in a radically new direction. For most Americans, Bodie says, stocks are entirely inappropriate vehicles for saving for retirement...