Word: banking
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...could, if you really wanted to stretch it, go back to the 1864 advent of the national banking system and the first federal bank regulator, the Comptroller of the Currency. Or even the chartering in 1791 of the partly government-owned Bank of the United States--Alexander Hamilton's baby, which died in 1811, seven years after...
...point is that the current breathless talk about bank nationalization is more than a little historically obtuse...
Successful bank cleanups in the past have involved triage, in which government differentiated good banks from bad. That's been combined with a mechanism to take bad loans and other unwanted assets, like real estate, off banks' books. Beyond that, there's no precise recipe. The government response in Sweden in the early 1990s, now cited as a blueprint, involved the takeover of precisely two banks. The rest of the country's banks remained in private hands, even though the government guaranteed their assets. (See the worst business deals...
...toughest question of all may come down to which banks actually stand a chance of returning to health. Bank regulators have embarked on "stress tests" of the 19 largest banks to determine that. But it's not clear how exacting the tests will be, and to be honest, nobody knows for sure how exacting they should be. Judged by liquidation value--what they could get for selling their assets on the open market today--most major banks in the U.S. are probably insolvent and due for a total government takeover. But that isn't the standard banks are judged...
Long before the era of globalization, before the supposed clash of civilizations, Salih came to represent what is best about cross-cultural encounters. Born and raised in a small village on the bank of the Nile, he was educated at universities in London and Khartoum. For most of his life, he worked for cultural organizations in the Middle East and Europe. He wrote in his native Arabic and found great success in English translation. Salih was a treasure. His death is a loss not just for his readers but for everything that binds us together...