Word: boom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that boggle the mind. In late March, for example, the government began soliciting bids for the Hong Kong - Zhuhai - Macau highway, a bridge-and-tunnel complex 16.5 miles (26.6 km) long that will allow connections among 35 ports in the Pearl River Delta, the cradle of China's economic boom. When completed in 2015, the $10 billion project will cut driving time from Hong Kong to the industrial area of Zhuhai from about four hours to just 30 minutes...
Graft was rife in construction projects long before the current downturn. "Public spending is already subject to considerable siphoning off and, perhaps even more critically, waste," says Andrew Wedeman, a political scientist and Chinese-corruption expert at the University of Nebraska. During the boom years, such waste mattered less because growth was so robust. But if China's GDP expands only 6% to 8% this year, as some predict, corruption could dampen recovery. "What really matters is not if funds will be siphoned off or how much will be siphoned off," Wedeman says, "but rather whether the siphoning will have...
...changed people, even as we revert to age-old patterns. (This season on 24, Jack Bauer sounded ambivalent about torture but roughed up people anyway.) The zeitgeist makes convenient wrapping to repackage the same sitcoms, hospital dramas and game shows: what was "comfort food" after 9/11, "optimism" in boom times and "inspiration" after Hurricane Katrina is "escapism" today...
...demand plummeting, driving world oil prices down to $10 a barrel. "If we run out of storage it could prompt a collapse in the price," says Wardell. Oil producers might then choose to dramatically cut output in order to run down the surplus. (See pictures from Azerbaijan's oil boom...
...healthy. Over the next five years Saudi Arabia has outlined a $400 billion spending program. In a decade or thereabouts, Saudi Arabia will become a $1 trillion economy and will be better placed than the rest in the region to capitalize on its knowledge and strengths. During the boom years, some critics said Saudi Arabia should become more like Dubai. Now the rest of the region might want to become a bit more like Saudi Arabia...