Word: banke
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What was different about the recent stress tests was that unlike the usual bank-by-bank examinations, the stress tests looked at all the banks as a group. By aggregating the data, the Fed presumably could make better estimates of what would be the loan losses at the individual banks. The stress tests also looked out two years, instead of the usual one, as regulators gauged if banks could weather a worsening of the economy - where the stress in the name comes from - and not just whether they had enough capital to pay for current losses. Most importantly, the results...
...Federal Reserve says the stress tests were a one-time thing and it has no plans to do them again. One problem with regularly repeating the tests is that they are expensive and time-consuming. The current one took 150 bank examiners six weeks to complete. Bert Ely, a bank-industry consultant, says bank executives don't want the stress tests to return. While Ely says he does believe the stress tests have influenced how regulators will view banks in the future, he's not sure he sees the point in them. "This is the government trying to steer business...
Eighteen months ago, when the world was awash in asset bubbles, there was perhaps no market more overheated than commodities. Prices of everything from iron ore to palm oil to corn reached dizzying heights. Crude oil nearly quintupled in five years; rice tripled in only five months. World Bank President Robert Zoellick called rising food and oil prices a "man-made catastrophe" that had the potential to quickly erase years of progress in overcoming poverty. Pundits dusted off Malthusian theories that the planet was physically unable to support the burgeoning appetites of an increasingly wealthy global population...
...rhetoric won't necessarily go down well with the White House. Iran's intentions worry the U.S. too, of course, but Obama and his advisers are expected to move briskly to an equally pressing matter: Netanyahu's refusal to back the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the keystone of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are demanding that Netanyahu sign on. Netanyahu has hinted that he does not oppose the creation of a Palestinian state...
...support from the Obama Administration and Congress, "it's no longer infinite," says an official at a pro-Israeli lobby in Washington. Obama is not George W. Bush, who backed Israel's wars in Lebanon and Gaza and rarely complained about the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. And the Obama Administration numbers plenty of ex-Clintonites who dislike Netanyahu from the last time around...