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First, the fragility. Allowing Lehman to fail - cited often as the government's biggest boo-boo - started a chain reaction. There was a run on money-market funds after one big money-market fund revealed that it owned a lot of suddenly worthless Lehman debt. London-based hedge funds that relied on Lehman for day-to-day financing found themselves unable to do business because their accounts with Lehman's U.K. subsidiary were frozen. Similar dislocations played out around the world. Before long, financial institutions were paralyzed by fear. They simply didn't trust each other anymore, and didn...
...gone soon anyway - the Bush Administration and Congress abandoned a bipartisan commitment to fiscal prudence that had held sway since the early 1990s and went back to running chronic deficits. The result was a growing economy and a second term for George W. Bush. (See George W. Bush's biggest economic mistakes...
...came, in 2008, it wasn't a crisis of government finances, as some pessimists had feared, but one of mortgages and Wall Street. As Washington battled the troubles, the deficit grew to an estimated $1.6 trillion in the fiscal year that ends this month. That's by far the biggest shortfall ever, in dollar terms. The government will have spent $3.7 trillion and taken in $2.1 trillion. Even by the more forgiving yardstick of percentage of gross domestic product, the shortfall is, at 11.2%, the biggest since World War II. It will be smaller next year but still huge...
...reforms. "This whole fund is being used to lure or bribe or implore or compel states and school districts to do things that we don't actually know are going to make things better," says Ravitch, who is critical of the accountability movement's emphasis on standardized testing. "My biggest problem with Duncan and Obama on education is that they are giving Bush a third term in education." Duncan counters that he is merely breaking down walls--borrowing a little bit from the left, a little bit from the right. "I just want to do what works," says Duncan...
...focusing on its latest reprocessing technology, which produces less waste, Areva aims to capture one-third of the new reactor construction market by 2030. That will be increasingly difficult because competition is heating up. Siemens now looks set to form a partnership with Rosatom, the industry's second biggest firm. And China's push for nuclear plants means there will probably soon be competition from there...