Word: bigs
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...eyed young man with a pert nose and a soft wave of brown hair, and so you get your parents to take you to his latest movie, Me and Some Dead Guy Who Was Famous Once and the boy is even cuter than usual, but there's also this big guy, with crazy eyes and much less docile hair, who talks about Shakespeare (kill me now), insults everybody - the cute boy worst of all - and chews cigars and sometimes when he talks you see actual spit coming out of his mouth? And on the way home your parents start talking...
...Neill, who perished during the attack on the World Trade Center and whose story is eloquently told in Lawrence Wright's masterly book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Time and time again O'Neill warned his superiors that al-Qaeda was readying a big strike, only to be marginalized, causing him to leave the bureau. Another prescient voice was that of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, whose book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order suggested that culture and religion would be the sources of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Huntington...
...therein lies the problem. For years the UAW and the Big Three - now dwindled to the Detroit Three - operated an unholy alliance. Management would pile on wage hikes and perks, and in return (wink, wink) the union would keep the peace, i.e., rule out strikes, even though both sides must have realized that the amount being paid to workers was unsustainable, particularly if the industry hit any downdrafts - which happened with increasing frequency starting with the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
Just as embarrassing was the colossal ineptitude of the big car companies: Ugly, low-quality cars with shameful gas mileage. Layers of redundant management that relied on amateurish financial controls. Insular thinking reinforced by decades of outsize market share. It was as if Detroit had drawn a road map for Toyota and Honda. And the Japanese drove right in, decimating the U.S. companies. In 1979, GM's U.S. employment peaked at 618,365. Today it's at 75,000 and falling fast. GM's U.S. market share, once about 50%, has fallen to about 20%. True, the quality and efficiency...
...Wall Street? By facing the music now. Toughen up borrowing requirements by banks. Increase oversight, especially when it comes to regulating derivatives. Perhaps enact a 21st century version of Glass-Steagall. And don't allow any institution to become too big to fail. Does that mean some countries may get ahead of us in terms of financial innovation? Sure, but so what? For much of this decade, both England and Iceland were considered friendlier to capital markets than the U.S. England is now threadbare; Iceland is bankrupt...