Word: boom
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When construction began on the Burj Dubai - as the record-breaking tower was originally called - Dubai was in the midst of an epic boom, fueled by foreign speculators and one luxury development project after another. By the time the tower opened on Jan. 4 with a lavish fireworks display, though, the showmanship had faded. Weeks earlier, Dubai's biggest state-owned development company had declared it was unable to pay its debts. Officially, Dubai owes its creditors $80 billion, though a recent report by regional investment bank EFG-Hermes estimates that the city may be in the hole...
...Greece's currency. The euro was managed by monetary wonks at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt for whom the Greek economy was but a blip. And the decision makers in Athens with responsibility for fiscal policy continued to blunder. The country kept running big deficits in the boom years. Then came the Great Recession. Last fall, a new government revealed that the 2009 budget deficit was much higher than previously disclosed--nearly 13% of GDP. Ever since, the world's financial markets have been going through another of their periodic losses of faith in Greece. Only this time...
...Boom...
...Boom!" Leroy Hayes describes sitting in his seventh-grade English class at Philadelphia's Shoemaker Middle School when he heard the explosion. It was startling but not necessarily surprising, he says. Crazy stuff happened all the time at Shoemaker. Once, he recalls, a student urinated into a soda bottle during class and threw it in a math instructor's face. Crazy stuff. After hearing the big explosion, Hayes and his friends rushed out of the room and discovered that someone had set off fireworks in the corridor. "The school was in chaos," the 11th-grader remembers of the 2005 incident...
McDonald's has doubtless benefited from the weak economy - its low-cost, seemingly healthy Snack Wraps (soft tortillas filled with chicken, lettuce and cheese) are perfectly positioned to feed a nation simultaneously worried about money and fat - but the company's boom actually began in 2006, before the recession hit. A major reason was the improvement in its menu. A glowing Feb. 2 Goldman Sachs analyst's report on McDonald's is typical of Wall Street sentiments. The report says McDonald's is "stepping up investment when peers cannot" and cites the "strong new product pipeline" as a key factor...