Word: billion
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...vitamin--may be better at unclogging arteries than an ingredient in Merck's multibillion-dollar cholesterol drugs Zetia and Vytorin, according to a recent study. It's the third trial in two years to question the pills' effectiveness. Patients are growing skittish: sales of both drugs fell to $4.56 billion in 2008, down 12% from the year before...
...finds itself at a crossroads, unable to generate the growth that so many Americans expect and the services so many need, and still struggling to revitalize an economy that for so many years was the envy of the world. The U.S. has been accumulating debt and owes about $800 billion to China alone; China has been building reserves and now has in excess of $2.2 trillion. China remains a poorer country on a per capita basis but is rapidly becoming an economic superpower. The U.S. is one of the most prosperous and stable countries in the world, but its system...
...benefits have flowed in both directions. Take Walmart. By some estimates, over the past several years, the retailer alone has accounted for 15% of U.S. imports from China, which would mean in excess of $30 billion this year. As those goods enter the port of Long Beach, Calif., they require American workers to offload them, American trains and trucks to ship them and American workers to sell them. None of those facts are visible in the trade statistics, yet they are real. And take a company like Schnitzer Steel of Oregon, a once regional company that collects and sells scrap...
...most popular books in China this year is China Is Not Happy, and the source of that unhappiness is an overly dependent relationship with the U.S. The two governments share some of those anxieties. Beijing worries that the continuing struggles of the U.S. economy will impair a $338 billion market for its exports and imperil its dollar-denominated investments. China pegged its currency to the dollar years ago in order to hitch its wagon to the world's most dynamic economy but today worries that a declining dollar will impede China's growth. Many in Washington and on Wall Street...
...future vitality: If our spirit of self-reliance does not wither with further government coddling, our debt from reform will destroy the can-do spirit of our posterity. And yet, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill passed by the House would reduce the deficit by $109 billion over the first decade, and the Senate bill would reduce it by $127 billion—not to mention the other, more difficult to quantify elements such as the excise tax on high-cost insurance that will bring down costs as we grow. On the flipside, if we keep...