Word: credit-card
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...which capacity exceeds demand, inflation drops below 0%, companies sit on their cash rather than investing it, prices fall and wages retreat. Workers paid low wages in inflationary times find their debt harder to repay if they get a further cut-a terrible prospect in this period of record credit-card bills. Deflation has devastated Japan since its 1980s bubble burst. "But you don't need to be Japanese to worry about it," says Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's chief economist. Now that the American and European stock bubbles have popped, Western economies are feeling similar pressures. August inflation...
...event, for local operations, terrorist cells are quite skilled at living off the environment. "Many Islamist terror plots in Europe and North America," says Jean-Francois Ricard, one of France's top antiterrorism investigators, "were self-financed through criminal activity--mainly stolen-car trafficking and, above all, credit-card fraud." When Kamel Daoudi, a French alleged al-Qaeda terrorist, was arrested in Britain last year, he had more than 100 forged credit cards...
...than ever before. Today its website is its fastest-growing sales channel, gaining rapidly on sales through catalogs and stores. But the firm, based in Woolrich, Pa., has stopped taking orders from abroad. Overseas online orders proved "nonprofitable," says Bruce Heggenstaller, vice president of operations and distribution. "We experienced credit-card fraud, mail fraud and hidden shipping and duty fees...
Merchants and credit-card companies report some progress in combating credit-card fraud in the U.S., but the problem appears to be growing across a wide swath of the developing world, where the spread of Internet access combines with petty official corruption to create a breeding ground for digital crime. Lately, credit-card fraud has been joined with often ingenious forms of postal and shipping fraud, moving more and more U.S. companies to refuse to ship goods to such countries as Indonesia, Russia and other former Soviet republics...
...about to be set off, it cannot instantly tip off a criminal squad, so the would-be villains can be rounded up. Also, the "spitting on the sidewalk" strategy is undermined; evidence produced by FISA wiretaps cannot be used to support an arrest for a mundane crime like credit-card fraud. Ashcroft and his aides regard the situation as silly and dangerous. "We've been trying to break the wall down so we can deal with this threat that is always crossing the wall," says an Ashcroft aide, "and this is putting walls back up." --By Elaine Shannon