Word: banking
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...Israelis, the West Bank's main battlefield is Nablus. An ancient city of 134,000 people boxed in by tall hills and scores of Israeli checkpoints, Nablus is dubbed by Israelis the "Capital of Terror." One officer says, "If I gave my men so much as a 15 minute break from their duties, there would be a bomb leaving Nablus on its way to Tel Aviv." No kidding: the IDF says that at the Nablus checkpoints last year, soldiers discovered 31 bombs, four guns and six grenades. And the Israelis claim that they destroyed 14 explosives labs in Nablus alone...
Popular sympathy for the militants means that they cannot yet be written off. A source close to Hamas commanders in the West Bank points out that Israelis have not caught the masterminds behind the Jerusalem yeshiva massacre and the Dimona café blast. "The Israelis are fools if they think we're going to keep fighting them with stones," this source says. "The Israelis update their weapons, and so do we." For now, Israelis have put a lid on militancy. But if that success breeds a new generation of terrorists, such as Abu Dhaim, who are willing to sacrifice life, marriage...
...same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exalted the status of the ratings by writing them into the rules governing securities firms' capital holdings. Since then, the use of bond ratings in regulation has only grown. Many institutional investors are banned from owning non-investment-grade bonds. Bank-capital requirements--the cash and equivalents banks need to keep on hand--give more weight to highly graded securities. And this is increasingly the case not just in the U.S. but around the world...
...suggested by Partnoy and several economists: cleansing the federal code of its reliance on bond ratings. Among the simplest fixes would be removing the ban on pension funds' holding debt securities rated lower than BBB. The funds can make far riskier investments in stocks and hedge funds, after all. Bank-capital requirements do have to take into account the quality of securities, but there are market-based measures that could at least partly replace ratings...
Livni, who labeled Hamas “extremists,” said that Israel’s policy is to talk with the Fatah, the Palestinian party that controls most of the West Bank...