Word: big
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...world economy is showing signs of recovery, stock markets are soaring and bankers are again awarding themselves big bonuses. But one year after the financial conflagration that devastated Wall Street and burned financial institutions around the globe, the main firefighters - central bankers, market regulators and government policymakers - continue to struggle with a central question: How do we prevent it from happening again...
...beefed up. There's also an emerging consensus on the need for banks to hold more capital and for their appetite for risk to be curtailed. But bigger issues are at stake too, ones that are more political and philosophical in nature: Should any bank be too big to fail? What should be done with financial activities that seem purely speculative and of questionable social use? How can the short-term, get-rich-quick mentality that drove so much market activity before the crash - and inflated those bonuses - be curbed? Is there a place for morality in the world...
...they would be able to leverage their balance sheets. They would also require banks to keep a portion of the loans they sell as asset-backed securities to ensure that they have a stake in what happens to those loans. Some regulators including Britain's Turner are calling for big financial institutions to have "living wills" that would enable their activities to be wound up in an orderly manner in the event they failed, thus avoiding the sort of panic caused by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers a year...
...layers of capital in the banks if there's no supplementary risk," says Ariane Obolensky, managing director of the French Banking Federation. But the tide is against such critics. As Stark of the ECB put it in a speech this month, "the simple statement that 'if banks are too big to fail, they are probably too big to exist' is a reasonable rule." The postcrisis financial system, he predicted, "will probably place greater emphasis on traditional banking activities, which tend to produce lower margins, but are also more robust, less risky and less volatile...
...Fixing Those Bonuses Almost everyone thinks something should be done to curb big paydays for bailed-out bankers, but solutions are elusive. Finance Ministers of the G-20 nations earlier this month agreed that bonuses should be more clearly tied to performance, but Britain and the U.S. resisted demands by France and Germany to have them capped. Sensing the prevailing political winds, some bankers are already moving to forestall draconian new rules. The Dutch banking association announced that its members have agreed to cap bonuses and severance pay. And in France, bankers have been so frequently called to the Elys...