Word: crediteers
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...have predicted such a rapid fall from grace for the affluent North Atlantic nation. Iceland topped the most recent U.N. Human Development Index and boasted one of the highest GDP's per capita in the world. But its banks, carrying massive debt loads, became early victims of the global credit crunch. In October, in an effort to salvage the hemorrhaging economy Haarde's government negotiated a $10 billion bail out package with the International Monetary Fund...
...played the leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial banks from Wall Street, and he inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives such as credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). (See who's to blame for the current financial crisis...
...more nuanced: All he and the Clinton Administration were trying to do with the 2000 bill, he claimed, was establish that interest-rate and currency swaps - two relatively uncontroversial forms of over-the-counter derivatives - couldn't be regulated as futures by the CFTC. At the time, credit-default swaps weren't on the radar, and the bill didn't prevent the Securities and Exchange Commission or bank regulators from stepping in with new rules...
They never did so, and Gramm acknowledged that the credit-default swaps market as it developed was "so opaque that nobody knew who was holding the bag." But he said he didn't buy that it was a major precipitating cause of the crisis. What was? "It was a confluence of two forces," he said. "Alone, neither would have created a cataclysm...
...slightly in December, and loan growth surged. Merrill Lynch said in a report that the fourth quarter of 2008 and this current quarter could be "the trough of this growth cycle," as government stimulus and loose monetary policy begin to boost domestic demand. The data gave enough hope to Credit Suisse's Tao to convince him to keep his 8% GDP growth estimate for 2009. "Double-digit growth won't come back in the next two to three years," says Tao, but the country is still better off than most. "China has one leg on a knee, but the rest...