Word: blunt
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...farm boy from the state of Uttar Pradesh in northeast India who grew up to be Prime Minister. Chandra Shekhar was known by both supporters and detractors as a political firebrand, an idealistic, secular nationalist who could be blunt to a fault. Indira Gandhi jailed him, along with many other of her outspoken political opponents, during a tumultuous period in the mid-1970s. Shekhar became Prime Minister in 1990, but holding only a slim majority in a fractious coalition, he served just seven months before resigning amid charges that his government was spying on political rival Rajiv Gandhi. Shekhar died...
...There are other reasons to steer clear. In its IPO filing, Blackstone was very blunt about how erratic profit can be. That may be the nature of the private equity business model - buying existing companies and then spending years fixing them up before reselling and realizing gains - but it also makes it next to impossible to model future earnings and thus come up with a fair stock price, says Brian Hamilton, CEO of Sageworks, a financial analysis firm that specializes in private companies going public...
...autobiography, Michael Bloomberg had a blunt response to people who griped about partisanship: "They're wrong!" Party allegiance, he wrote, is "as important as the individual who's running." The billionaire media and finance mogul actually started one sentence with the words: "As a wealthy Democrat who has given consistently to my party." He then complained about all the candidates - "from those running for dog catcher on up" - who kept bugging him for campaign cash...
Still, these liberties do little to blunt the book's power as literature - or, perhaps more important, as an allegory of Kapuscinski's own communist-era Poland. Indeed, as The Emperor was going to press, the Polish government approved an extravagant flood-control program for the Vistula River; the author phoned in a new passage about a costly dam built by Selassie. "Everything is a metaphor," Kapuscinski once said. "My ambition is to find the universal...
...times their projected 2007 earnings-a high ratio even for a fast-growing developing economy-China is causing a serious case of the shakes. The issue isn't simply that the little guys are in danger of losing their savings. It's whether a serious market downturn might blunt, or even reverse, China's growth. Mainland authorities have already made it clear that they are concerned about economic overheating, "and the stock market is part of that picture," says an economist at the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). On May 18, China raised interest rates for the second time...