Word: bigs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Borlaug--who died Sept. 12 at the age of 95--joined the Rockefeller Foundation's effort to conquer hunger in Mexico. At the time, agricultural researchers were enhancing crop yields by bombing plants with nitrogen fertilizer. But they eventually discovered that the process made seed heads grow so big they would collapse in the field. Nature seemed to have hit a wall...
Last Sept. 15, the venerable investment-banking firm of Lehman Brothers--saddled with a lot of dud real estate investments and unable to persuade its jittery creditors to keep lending it money--filed for bankruptcy protection. It was the largest bankruptcy ever in the U.S., but the really big news was what happened afterward. First came a financial panic that threatened to shatter the global capitalist order, followed by an unprecedented--and unprecedentedly expensive--effort by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to patch things...
...From ill-considered deregulation of banking and derivatives to over-the-top encouragement of homeownership, Washington's fingerprints are all over the crisis. Almost nothing has been done to right these wrongs. That's lesson No. 3. Put another way: it's really hard for a democracy to make big changes in the absence of a big crisis--and the big crisis has passed...
President Barack Obama warned in a speech on Wall Street Sept. 14 that "normalcy cannot lead to complacency." But normalcy is leading to complacency. Consider the financial reforms that Obama's Administration wants to push through Congress: the big ones are creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, giving the Federal Reserve the job of systemic-risk regulator and establishing a "resolution regime" to wind down troubled nonbank financial institutions (like Lehman) and complex bank holding companies. Steps in the right direction? Probably. Truly major reforms? Not so much--and even they may not win congressional approval...
...house is falling, according to data from the National Association of Home Builders. That fits shifting demographics. As baby boomers gray, fewer people have kids at home. In 2000, 33% of households included children; by 2030, only 27% will. "Single people and households without children don't want big houses on big lots," says Arthur Nelson, director of metropolitan research at the University of Utah's College of Architecture and Planning. To visualize the coming change, imagine a turreted Victorian mansion, the sort that was popular at the turn of the 1900s. Now picture an Arts & Crafts bungalow, the small...