Word: britishism
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Last year British Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised his country's top marginal rate for income tax to 50% from 40%. This came on the heels of a decision to borrow more than $1 trillion over the next five years, bringing his country's public debt to 79% of GDP by 2013. There has been the expected backlash from the superrich, but the majority of Brits don't seem to mind so much...
There's pressure on sterling from all sides. The currency fell below $1.50 for the first time in 10 months on Monday after an opinion poll published in a British newspaper suggested that none of the parties contesting the country's upcoming general election would emerge with overall control. A so-called hung parliament, investors deduced, would not likely result in a clear plan to tackle the country's dreadful public finances. (See pictures of the financial crisis in London...
Also a factor in Monday's slide: plans announced by Prudential, a British insurer, to buy the Asian operations of AIG for an eye-popping $35 billion. Much of that would be paid in cash, Prudential said, which would mean swapping huge piles of sterling for dollars. Toss in the relentless pressure from speculators betting on a falling pound, as well as Britain's generally horrible fiscal position, and "sterling has sailed into a perfect storm of negativity," Nick Beecroft, a senior foreign exchange consultant at Saxo Bank, wrote in a research note earlier this week...
...good news for Britain's pound: nasty fronts like this are usually rare, and soon pass. For one, the slide likely had more to do with Prudential's announcement than with intensified concerns about hung parliaments, as was reported widely in the British press, says Daragh Maher, deputy head of global foreign exchange strategy at Credit Agricole in London. In some ways, that's encouraging. If a single opinion poll was able to trigger the kind of slump seen Monday - in a volatile day of trading, sterling eventually closed 1.7% down on the dollar - an actual hung parliament might...
That's because this Pakistani frontier city, despite its large army garrison dating back to the British colonial days, had been in the grips of the Taliban's reign of fear. Nearly twice a week, they would send suicide bombers - often God-struck kids in their early teens - down from training camps in the mountains to blow themselves up at a busy crossroads or police station. They kidnapped rich businessmen, doctors and lawyers for ransom. And they silenced the music, shutting shops and banning songs at rowdy Pashtun tribal weddings, calling them "un-Islamic...