Word: banking
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...thing he had dreaded: the futures market in free fall. Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed president Timothy Geithner had spent the past year staving off one disaster after another, for the most part working behind the scenes. Earlier in the month, they had let investment bank Lehman Brothers slide into oblivion and then ushered another, Merrill Lynch, into the arms of Bank of America. Just the night before, the trio had wrapped up a deal to rescue insurance giant American International Group and gone to bed praying it would halt the panic and worrying it wouldn...
...does what depends on which agency has the most authority for the task at hand. Paulson was the primary mover last fall in getting banks and mortgage companies to ease up on homeowners who faced foreclosure, while Bernanke dropped billions into jittery credit markets with a surprise rate cut. Geithner engineered the rescue in March of the investment bank Bear Stearns. In the summer, Paulson horsed Congress into giving him broad authority to seize troubled lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--which he ended up having to use two months later. And when the three have run into interference from...
...city began as a trading post at the intersection of two Indian trails, hosted America's first gold rush and first mint, and later blossomed into a transportation and textile hub. Charlotte's white leaders agreed to desegregation relatively early, concluding that turmoil was bad for business. And local banks exploited North Carolina's liberal acquisition laws to build the conglomerates that now dominate headlines. Today Charlotte's nine FORTUNE 500 companies help run the city, not only by writing checks--Bank of America and Wachovia have pledged $15 million apiece to build new cultural centers--but also by helping...
...there's no longer anything trifling about Charlotte. With $2 trillion in assets being managed from the glossy bank towers of Tryon Street, the city is now the nation's No. 2 financial center behind New York City. In early September, Bank of America, the behemoth of North Tryon and the largest U.S. bank, swallowed the beleaguered investment firm Merrill Lynch, while Wachovia, its competitor on South Tryon, considered a merger with Morgan Stanley. And while the rest of the country is sinking, Charlotte is soaring, with 28 construction cranes downtown. It's got the nation's least-battered metropolitan...
...system into a tailspin. The headline-grabbing failures follow a year-long financial decline, caused by unexpectedly high rates of home loan defaults that tore through the economy and wiped out billions in capital. The downturn accelerated in recent months as lenders, spooked by steep losses and high-profile bank failures, tightened their purse strings. As Harvard’s endowment has ballooned over the past decade, spending has increased in kind, with $1.6 billion in expenditures coming from the endowment last fiscal year. As late as 2005, the payout from the endowment was still under $1 billion. With...